Reading List

Authors Like Anne Fadiman

Lia Lee was born in Merced, California, in 1982 to Hmong refugees from Laos. She had her first seizure at three months. Her parents understood it as quag dab peg, “the spirit catches you and you fall down”; her doctors at Merced Community Medical Center came to treat it as epilepsy. In 1986, after a severe seizure, she fell into a coma and never recovered higher brain function. She died in 2012, aged 30. Anne Fadiman’s account of the family and the doctors, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997), won the National Book Critics Circle Award. A year later she published Ex Libris, essays that open with the merging of her books with her husband’s. Her new collection, Frog, appeared in February 2026. The ten writers below share her two subjects: what happens when cultures misread each other, and the pleasure of a life spent among books.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Narrative nonfiction · Familiar essays · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Anne Fadiman, start with Arthur Kleinman, the psychiatrist and anthropologist whose questions for patients she quotes in The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, and Kao Kalia Yang, whose The Latehomecomer (2008) tells a Hmong family’s story from inside it. For the essayist of Ex Libris, Charles Lamb is the original familiar essayist. Further down are reporters who, like Fadiman, spent years inside a single story.

10 authors like Anne Fadiman

01
The first familiar essayist

Charles Lamb

English · Tales from Shakespeare (1807, with Mary Lamb), Essays of Elia (1823)

Lamb was born in London in 1775 and worked for more than thirty years as a clerk at the East India Company. In 1796 his sister Mary killed their mother during a breakdown, and he looked after her for the rest of his life; together they wrote Tales from Shakespeare. The Essays of Elia, first published in the London Magazine, are personal essays on subjects such as old china, roast pig and his own reading.

The writer behind the essayist Fadiman became. At Large and At Small (2007) is subtitled “Familiar Essays”, Lamb’s form: learned, funny, personal, and happy to follow a small subject wherever it goes.

— Lisanne
02
A reader and a bookshop

Helene Hanff

American · 84, Charing Cross Road (1970), The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street (1973)

Hanff was born in Philadelphia in 1916 and died in New York in 1997. 84, Charing Cross Road collects twenty years of letters, from 1949, between Hanff, a struggling New York writer, and Frank Doel of Marks & Co, a second-hand bookshop in London that sent her the books she could not find at home. It became a play and a 1987 film.

For readers who came to Fadiman through Ex Libris. Hanff, like Fadiman, writes about books as physical objects and about the people a love of reading binds together.

— Lisanne
03
Reading as a way of life

Alberto Manguel

Argentine-Canadian · A History of Reading (1996), Packing My Library (2018)

Manguel was born in Buenos Aires in 1948. As a teenager working in a bookshop there, he read aloud to the nearly blind Jorge Luis Borges several times a week from 1964 to 1968. He became a Canadian citizen and later directed Argentina’s National Library from 2016 to 2018. Packing My Library is about taking his own library apart.

The cosmopolitan companion to Ex Libris. Fadiman writes about one family’s shelves, Manguel about reading through history, but both care about what owning, arranging and losing books means.

— Lisanne
04
The questions she quotes

Arthur Kleinman

American · The Illness Narratives (1988), The Soul of Care (2019)

Kleinman, born in 1941, is a psychiatrist and medical anthropologist at Harvard. The Illness Narratives argues that doctors must listen to how patients themselves understand and explain their illness. The Soul of Care is his account of looking after his wife, Joan, through early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

Fadiman quotes Kleinman’s questions for drawing out a patient’s own view of an illness in The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. Read him for the medical thinking behind her reporting.

— Lisanne
05
Years inside one story

Tracy Kidder

American · The Soul of a New Machine (1981), Mountains Beyond Mountains (2003)

The Soul of a New Machine, about a team of engineers racing to build a computer at Data General, won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1982. Mountains Beyond Mountains follows the doctor and anthropologist Paul Farmer, who built health care for the poor in rural Haiti.

Kidder and Fadiman share a method: years of reporting on a small group of people until the reader understands how each of them sees the world. Mountains Beyond Mountains is the hopeful counterpart to Lia’s story, about a doctor who crosses cultures to treat the poor.

— Lisanne

Every book by Tracy Kidder →

06
A surgeon on what medicine misses

Atul Gawande

American · Complications (2002), Being Mortal (2014)

Gawande was born in Brooklyn in 1965 to Indian immigrant doctors and is a surgeon and a staff writer for The New Yorker. Being Mortal argues that modern medicine treats ageing and dying as problems to fix rather than lives to support, and includes the story of his father’s death.

Gawande writes from inside the profession Fadiman observes from outside. Both ask what doctors fail to hear when they talk to patients and families, and both answer with stories rather than statistics.

— Lisanne

Every book by Atul Gawande →

07
A family and a hospital

Rebecca Skloot

American · The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010)

Skloot, born in 1972, spent about a decade on The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, about the Black tobacco farmer whose cancer cells were taken without her knowledge at Johns Hopkins in 1951 and became the HeLa cell line. She worked closely with Lacks’s daughter Deborah; some members of the family have since criticised the book and who has profited from it.

The closest book in shape to Fadiman’s: a family failed by American medicine, told by a white outsider who spent years earning its trust. It raises the same question about who gets to tell such a story.

— Lisanne

Every book by Rebecca Skloot →

08
Inside a Mumbai settlement

Katherine Boo

American · Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2012)

Boo’s reporting on group homes for the Washington Post won the paper the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Behind the Beautiful Forevers, the result of more than three years of reporting in Annawadi, a settlement beside Mumbai’s airport, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Boo shares Fadiman’s patience and her refusal to make anyone a villain. She writes about poor families dealing with institutions that do not understand them, which is Fadiman’s subject on another continent.

— Lisanne

Every book by Katherine Boo →

09
The Hmong story, from inside

Kao Kalia Yang

Hmong-American · The Latehomecomer (2008), Where Rivers Part (2024)

Yang was born in 1980 in Ban Vinai refugee camp in Thailand and moved to Minnesota with her family in 1987. The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir follows her family from the war in Laos through the camps to Saint Paul and won two Minnesota Book Awards. Where Rivers Part tells her mother’s life.

The writer here who complicates Fadiman. Fadiman explained the Hmong to American readers as a sympathetic outsider; Yang, from the same generation of Hmong refugees as the Lees, tells her own family’s story in her own voice. Read her alongside The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.

— Lisanne
10
Parents and children who differ

Andrew Solomon

American · The Noonday Demon (2001), Far from the Tree (2012)

Solomon was born in New York in 1963. The Noonday Demon, about depression, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Far from the Tree draws on interviews with families whose children differ sharply from their parents, through deafness, dwarfism, autism, schizophrenia and other conditions, and won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Like the Lees, Solomon’s families are trying to love and care for a child the world around them does not understand. He gives every side the same respect that runs through Fadiman’s book.

— Lisanne

Every book by Andrew Solomon →

Where to start if you loved Anne Fadiman

If you loved The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, read Kao Kalia Yang.

The Latehomecomer: a Hmong family’s journey from Laos to Minnesota, in its own voice.

If you want the medical thinking behind it, read Arthur Kleinman.

The Illness Narratives: why doctors need to hear how patients explain their illness.

If you loved Ex Libris, read Helene Hanff.

84, Charing Cross Road: twenty years of letters between a reader and a London bookshop.

If you want long, patient reporting, read Katherine Boo.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: more than three years in a Mumbai settlement.

If you want more Anne Fadiman, read her in order.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997), Ex Libris (1998), At Large and At Small (2007), The Wine Lover’s Daughter (2017), a memoir of her father, and Frog (2026).

Frequently asked questions about authors like Anne Fadiman

Who writes like Anne Fadiman?

Arthur Kleinman, Kao Kalia Yang and Charles Lamb are the closest matches. Kleinman supplied the questions about illness she quotes, Yang tells a Hmong family’s story from inside it, and Lamb is the original familiar essayist behind Ex Libris and At Large and At Small.

What should I read after The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down?

Kao Kalia Yang’s The Latehomecomer (2008) for a Hmong family’s own account, and Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010) for another family failed by American medicine. Arthur Kleinman’s The Illness Narratives (1988) explains the ideas behind Fadiman’s reporting.

Does Anne Fadiman have a new book?

Yes. Frog: And Other Essays was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on 10 February 2026. Its subjects include her family’s long-lived pet frog, an old laser printer she could not give up, and Hartley Coleridge, the poet’s eldest son.

What books are like Ex Libris?

Helene Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross Road (1970), Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading (1996) and Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia (1823), the model for the familiar essay Fadiman writes.

Which Anne Fadiman book should I read first?

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997) if you want reporting; it won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Ex Libris (1998) if you want short, funny essays about books.

Who was Lia Lee?

Lia Lee was born in Merced, California, in 1982 to Hmong refugee parents and had her first seizure at three months. A severe seizure in 1986 left her in a coma from which she never recovered higher brain function; she died in 2012, aged 30.

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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