I'm not sure he appreciated 'Nudes for Nudes.' I saw him eyeing the aquamarine felt-tip-pen stain on the chair near the front door, the grungy sofa, the ancient gas stove. Paolo was far too upscale to have only one name.) He walked around the loft. We engaged a real estate agent who dressed in black and had an Italian first name and a last name that was half French and half Spanish. 'The hallmark of the familiar essay is that it is autobiographical, but also about the world,' Fadiman says.įadiman, who writes about everything from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to ice cream, shares her thoughts on why it was so enjoyable to pen a familiar essay about coffee, blogging as a literary genre and why many of her readers think of her as being a good friend.įrom Chapter 8: Moving, which chronicles Fadiman's family move from New York City to western Massachusetts: Among Lamb's topics, for instance, were tailors, drunkards and annoying relatives. In the early 19th century, writers such as Lamb and William Hazlett wrote about themselves, but at the same time about a subject that they knew their readers knew, too. The familiar essay, Fadiman tells Rebecca Roberts, is a subset of the personal essay – but not as personal as the personal essay familiar to 21st-century readers. She also has a big crush on Romantic-era essayist Charles Lamb, which is evident in her new book, a collection of familiar essays called At Large and At Small. Whether she is exploring a medical culture clash in The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, or negotiating the fraught terrain of merging her books with her husband's in Ex Libris, author Anne Fadiman clearly has a big crush on the English language.

Ex libris by anne fadiman