‘Frog and Other Essays’: a neglected pet, polar explorers, and classroom connections

The seven essays in Anne Fadiman’s new collection, “Frog and Other Essays” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) are not all amphibious in theme. 

While the title essay recalls the so-called life of her family’s pet frog, other essays take readers on a deep dive into the celebrated nonfiction writer’s thoughts on the evolving use of pronouns, her obsession with the lives of polar explorers, and the poignant connections she shares with her writing students at Yale. 

While these essays were previously published elsewhere, Fadiman took the opportunity to further improve upon each one, in some cases even adding new material. 

“I revised all these essays and was grateful to have the chance to do so,” said Fadiman, the Francis Writer in Residence and a professor in the practice of English, in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “If you put an essay away for a few months, or a few years, you’re bound to spot some infelicities that were invisible on the first round.” 

Fadiman’s first book, “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” (1997), won a National Book Critics’ Circle Award for General Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Salon Book Award. The book explores the cultural gulf between a Hmong refugee family with a severely epileptic daughter and the American medical system.

That was followed by two essay collections, “Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader” (1998), about her love affair with books, and “At Large and At Small” (2007). Her 2017 memoir, “The Wine Lover’s Daughter,” examines her relationship with her father, the late Clifton Fadiman, a literary critic, editor, and radio and television host.

She helped edit and wrote the introduction to “The Opposite of Loneliness” (Scribner, 2014), a collection of stories and essays by her late student, Marina Keegan ’12, which became a New York Times bestseller.

Fadiman’s essays and articles have appeared in numerous publications, including Harper’s, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Yale Review, Harvard Review, and Lapham’s Quarterly. 

In 2012, she was awarded Yale’s Richard H. Brodhead Prize for Teaching Excellence.

Fadiman sat down with Yale News to talk about her newest collection. The conversation has been condensed and edited. 

You show up in every essay in this collection, albeit sometimes only briefly, even when the subject appears to have very little to do with you. That made all the essays more meaningful for me — you let the reader know why each subject resonates with you. 

Anne Fadiman: I always write about things that I care about a lot. And I think it’s important for the reader to know why I care. Some of the essays are very personal, as in the title essay about our family’s pet frog, Bunky. Even the essays that don’t seem to be specifically about me in some ways are. The essay about pronouns comes out of my experiences with my students at Yale. The two subjects that are farthest afield — the one about The South Polar Times and the one about Hartley Coleridge, the eldest son of the great romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge — also come from my own interests. 

When I submitted these essays to my editor, Jonathan Galassi, at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, he called the collection “crypto-autobiography.” In other words, even the ones that weren’t explicitly autobiographical had hidden autobiography. I thought that was a wonderful word to describe it. 

Several of the essays grew out of your experiences teaching at Yale. The essay titled “Screen Share” is about your first time teaching your “Writing about Oneself” class over Zoom at the start of the pandemic. I was struck by how tenderly you write about the students in that class. Would you say you all became closer over Zoom than you might have otherwise?

Fadiman: Yes, although I think that wouldn’t have happened unless we’d already met in person. This was the spring of 2020, and we all first got to know each other well by sitting around a table in a small classroom for two and a half months. The essay is about what it was like for an older professor who is really terrible at technology to have to pivot almost instantly to a form of technology that she’d never used before. The original version of the piece was published as soon as the semester ended, in Wired magazine. It was a kind of journal — I was taking notes during the course of the semester as everything was unfolding. 

During the weeks when that class met by Zoom, between spring break and the end of the year, my students’ lives just completely collapsed. The seniors found out that they weren’t going to have a commencement. Their internships disappeared. Many of their jobs disappeared. Most of them were living at home with their parents, isolated from their friends. Their classmates in “Writing about Oneself,” I think, became a sort of lifeline. The class certainly was one for me. Since the students didn’t have any extracurriculars, they had plenty of time to devote to writing about themselves and to each other, and it was incredibly intimate. They were so touchingly supportive of each other and their writing was so good. 

This book was launched at a bookstore in New York in early February and four of the members of that 12-person class came to my reading. It was wonderful to see them — there was something extra special about that class. 

Technology is a recurring theme throughout the book— your aversion to new technology and preference for clinging to the old. You just linked that tendency to your age, but is it also just part of who you are?

Fadiman: A lot of it is linked to age. I mean, the most important thing about my age is that I am addicted to print. I would never wish to read a book or a magazine unless I can hold it in my hands. I do value technology, and I remember being very excited when I got my first computer and my first printer. I wasn’t a particularly late adopter in my youth. So my reluctance to upgrade my technology may be partly temperament, but I think it’s mostly age. Age permeates this book. It’s not written for people my age, but it’s written by someone my age. I’m 72, and a lot of these pieces are about loss of various sorts. The dead frog and the dead printer. A dead 19th-century poet. Dead polar explorers. And finally, I lose a student to whom I was particularly close. I think that if I had written and, in particular, revised these essays when I was 35, they wouldn’t be suffused with the same feelings of loss and poignancy and nostalgia. 

But it’s not entirely a sad collection. It’s filled with humor. 

Fadiman: Yes — but, of course, the line between humor and tragedy is often blurry. Just last week in my “Writing about Oneself” class, I put a quotation from the 18th-century French playwright Pierre Beaumarchais up on the blackboard: “I quickly laugh at everything for fear of having to cry.” I do feel that the line between the two is blurry, and I’m very interested in that blur in my own work, in the work that I read, and in my students’ work.

In “Screen Share,” you note that you advise your students that “good first-person writing requires vulnerability.” I would say that in this collection, you’re at your most vulnerable in the title essay about your family’s pet frog Bunky. Would you talk about the shame that is at the heart of this piece? 

Fadiman: I’m not at all sure I would have written that essay, or at least not as honestly, if it weren’t for my students. I had the strong feeling that if I was constantly encouraging them to be vulnerable about their flaws, about the things that they were ashamed by, about the things that they were hesitant to share with others, then I damn well better be willing to do the same myself. 

The subject sounds trivial. It’s about a frog that my family had for either 16 or 17 years. The fact that we can’t remember exactly when we got him is one of the signs that he was not our family’s most important pet. We raised Bunky from a tadpole. We had no idea what species he was, until eventually we found out he was an African clawed frog, a very long-lived species. 

But even though we provided Bunky with a long life, I don’t think we provided him with a life worth living. His aquarium was much too small. I kept thinking about getting a new one, and I never did. I feel guilty about that to this day. After his death, when I was writing this essay, an extra layer of guilt was added. I learned that some people feed their African clawed frogs all kinds of interesting foods, including woodlice. And I thought Bunky would probably have loved woodlice. He ate nothing but Stage One and then Stage Two frog nuggets from the Grow-a-Frog Company every single meal of his entire life. I think of myself as an animal lover, but I maltreated Bunky both by paying him no attention and by failing to do some fairly easy things that could have given him a much better life. 

In the excerpt you recorded to accompany this conversation, you talk about Bunky being in the freezer. Would you put that passage in context for our readers?

Fadiman: Yes, I don’t want any readers to think that we kept Bunky in the freezer for six years because we wanted to prepare some kind of fancy French frog-leg dish. We put him there because we wanted to bury him when both of our adult children were home. But they only seemed to be home at the same time at Christmas, when the ground was frozen. A few months went by and then a few years and then six years. Finally, my husband and I just went ahead and took Bunky’s Ziploc bag out of the freezer and we buried him without our children.

I want to read a brief excerpt from the essay titled “South Polar Times.” You write: “The South Polar Times is proof of something all editors know and all publishers deny: that the value of a periodical cannot be judged by the size of its circulation. There was only one copy of each of its 12 issues to be shared (depending on the year) by between 13 and 47 readers. It would come out monthly, but only in winter.” Would you talk about this remarkable publication?

Fadiman: It’s one of my favorite publications in the world. So, on various Arctic and Antarctic expeditions, British and otherwise, there had been a lot of problems with the long polar night, which in Antarctica lasted from April to August. For months it was completely dark and extremely cold. No exploration could be done. The men were stuck either on board a ship or in a hut on land with absolutely nothing to do. There had been instances of men on earlier expeditions losing their sanity or becoming violent. 

In order to guard against this, Robert Falcon Scott, who led two famous British Antarctic expeditions at the beginning of the 20th century, brought various things like magic tricks and theatrical costumes to keep the men entertained through the darkness. But he also made sure that there was a typewriter and an editor. On Scott’s first expedition, it was Ernest Shackleton, who later became a famous explorer in his own right. Shackleton also had other duties on this expedition, but the one that most interested me was his editorship of a periodical, The South Polar Times. Anybody of any rank could submit material. There was just one copy of each issue, typed by Shackleton, and it was passed around, hand to hand. The periodical was extremely funny. The hand-drawn illustrations were beautiful. Some of the writing was extraordinarily good. There were comic poems, there were plays, there were essays. The periodical was one of the most important things to keep morale up during the long polar night.

In the final essay about your former student Marina Keegan, who was killed in a car accident shortly after graduating in 2012, you recall a moment when she stood up in your classroom and questioned a visiting novelist who had just declared that making a living as a writer is close to impossible these days. She herself fully intended to pursue such a career. What advice do you give your students about making a life and a living as a writer?

Fadiman: I tell my students that if they want to be writers, they have nothing to lose by trying it out. Many of them are journalists. If they work for a newspaper or public radio or a magazine for three years and find they’re not as good as they hoped or that they can’t make any money, then they apply to law school, which in many cases leads to an extremely fulfilling career. And they’re going to get into a better law school at that point because they’ll be so much more interesting. It’s win-win! I share lists of where my alums are currently working, and they often help each other. Nine of my alums are at The New Yorker, and a few more than that at The New York Times. And, of course, many other periodicals. They’re not there because they studied with me. They’re there because Yale has great writing classes and wonderful journalism advising through the Yale Journalism Initiative. I was just lucky enough to be one of their many teachers.

So I encourage my students to be writers, while also acknowledging that it’s so much harder for them than it was for me when I was starting out in the 1970s, when there were so many more places to publish, when it was easy to get entry-level jobs in journalism, when it was easy to freelance, when we were paid proportionately so much better than young people are today. I know that it’s harder for my students, but it’s not impossible.