![]() ![]() ![]() Her family, on the other hand, believed the doctors’ recommendations made the child sicker and failed to address what they saw as the cause of her illness: spirits that had kidnapped her soul and needed to be placated with animal sacrifices. Doctors at the American hospital where her family sought treatment prescribed an elaborate drug regimen to control her seizures. Lia had an unusual and severe form of epilepsy. This deeply researched, profoundly empathetic story of cultural miscommunication in medicine focuses on the case of Lia Lee, the doted-on youngest daughter in a family of Hmong refugees in rural Northern California. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997) What they all share is a commitment to “mostly truth” and the belief that digging deep to find a real story-whether it’s located in your memory, on dusty archive shelves, in Russian literature, in a slum in Mumbai-is a task worth undertaking. Slate’s list of the definitive nonfiction books written in English in the past quarter-century includes beautifully written memoirs but also books of reportage, collections of essays, travelogues, works of cultural criticism, passionate arguments, even a compendium of household tips. Yet what reader hasn’t had her mind expanded, her heart plucked, her conscience stirred by a nonfiction book? The responsibility the writers of such books take on, to arrange the facts of the world into a form that makes sense of its tumult, can produce in the reader a kind of clarity of thought that no other genre can match. It can be easy to dismiss these forms as the worthwhile but fundamentally unliterary assemblage of facts into paragraphs. While memoir has gained a foothold in the literary conversation, narrative and reported nonfiction tend to be ignored. In the work of canon-building, nonfiction tends to get short shrift. ![]()
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