Anne Fadiman at Bookshop West Portal

Bookshop West Portal, my neighborhood bookstore, has a lot of good events.  Earlier this year it hosted "What We Do Now:  Standing Up for Our Values in Trump's America" and "Radical Hope."  Maybe my favorite ever was when they hosted Richard Russo, whose writing I like so much and who's taught composition and written about parents who had a very different way of responding to student writing.  I had the chance to ask him about his experience at the same time that I was responding to student (ESL student) writing.

When I found out that Anne Fadiman was going to be doing a reading, I started listening to The Wine-Lover's Daughter and then bought the book so I could mark favorite passages.  I also wrote her a fan letter and told her about the JoMama Book Club.

Before she spoke and read, Neal and Susan served us wine.

  A friend of hers had sat down next to me and was soon joined by his wife, who'd just gotten two "incredible salads" at Lemonade, just down the block on West Portal.  It turned out that they had brought Anne Fadiman to the reading, and he was mentioned in her book  as her companion trying wines in the chapter "Initiation."  I'd marked a section of page 49:

                        Peter and I were eighteen.  In those days, there was nothing out of the ordinary about spending a                          weekend alone with a boy with whom you     were not sleeping, though I knew Peter wished our                            platonic relationship were otherwise.  The previous yer, he had sent me a love letter--    the best                            one I have ever received--in which he wrote, "Every part of me loves every part of you."  He                                   would,  in fact, have made an excellent boyfriend, but I can see that only now, more than forty                                 years later.  We are still friends.  I was Best Human at his wedding.  He     was a bridesperson at                           mine.

He seemed very happy with the woman he married.

Anne Fadiman's father hosted the show "Information, Please" and got 10% of the American population listening.  She lamented that now readers just wanted to get instructions on how to get richer and do better on match.com  and said, "No one like my father could command the attention of 10% of Americans now."

She said that winning the National Book Award in 1997 completely took her by surprise.  "I"d written about an epileptic Hmong toddler!"  she said.  (Of course, we know she'd written about a whole culture, cultural insensitivity, the medical profession, etc., and she knows that too.)  She wanted to let her parents know she'd won the award, so someone handed her a cell phone--an enormous thing--and it was the first time she'd ever used one.  

She said when she was  recording her book, she thought, "Why does this writer use such long sentences!?" It turned out that I had heard her on Audible even before she did.  She hadn't even known that the Audible version was out!