February 23, 2026

Frog and Other Essays, by Anne Fadiman

The day I first met my friend Nathalie was, in some ways, the day my life began, because it was also the day I discovered Anne Fadiman, when Nathalie gave me a copy of one of her essay collections—I think it was Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. And I very quickly became a devotee, devouring her other collection, and then the book on rereading which she’d edited, and ever since, Nathalie and I have been waiting for, craving, still more Anne Fadiman, her humour, her focus, her attention, her brilliance.

And then finally, Anne Fadiman delivered, with a new collection called Frog and Other Essays, which does not disappoint. If I designed the world, there would be stacks of copies at the entrance to every bookshop in the country and descending hoards on the verge of riot who want to buy them, but it turned out that our local Indigo had ordered in two. When I showed up at the store to purchase one, I texted Nathalie to let her know (she’d had no idea!) and before I’d even brought my copy to the till (I take a long time to browse, it’s true) Nathalie had come into the store and bought the copy remaining. (I’ve just checked their stock and there are two more on the shelf!).

What a thing to finally pick up a book that you’ve been waiting to read for more than 15 years—and Frog does not disappoint. Although the opening essay was unexpected—so many of Fadiman’s essays are the result of her close attention, and this one (about her children’s long-lived pet frog) was about a being to which she’d paid very little attention at all. (It made me laugh until I cried. “You may be wondering: What kind of frog was he? / I didn’t.”) Fadiman is so thoughtful, so intelligent, so creative, her thoughts so nimble, and so an essay about a mostly ignored frog (THAT LIVED FOR 17 YEARS!) is also a meditation on devotion (and otherwise), domestic life, care, family, and changes over time.

And then her essay on her printer. Her printer! “[A] Hewlett-Packard LaserJet Series II that cost $1,795” in 1987, and would live on for decades, Frankensteined together from spare parts mined on eBay. In “The Oakling and the Oak,” she writes about Coleridge’s disappointing son Hartley, and the nature of progeny, disappointing or otherwise. In “All My Pronouns,” she expounds on her evolving relationship with the rules of grammar, informed by her strict prescriptionist sensibility, but also from her relationship with her beloved students at Yale, where she is a Professor of English and teaches nonfiction writing. “Screen share” is a trip through Zoom learning in Spring 2020, what was lost, what was gained. The final line is, “At 5:20, I am reluctant to click the button that says, ‘End Meeting for All.'”

In “South Polar Times,” readers indulge Fadiman’s obsession with polar expeditions to much reward, this one about the newsletter produced by Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated polar expeditions. And then finally, “Yes to Everything!” about Fadiman’s student, Marina Keegan, a writer of great promise whose sudden death was shocking and whose work was published posthumously in the collection The Opposite of Loneliness.

Oh, I love the world through the eyes of Anne Fadiman. And I love Anne Fadiman, and I love Nathalie for giving me Anne Fadiman (among so many other riches). Like all the best thing, Fadiman’s work is never enough, but also it manages to be everything.