A Yale Professor Thinks Your Pet Frog is Worth a Whole Book

Anne Fadiman, a literary essayist and Yale professor, has a message for anyone who thinks their life is too mundane for a memoir: you're wrong. She's built a career, and her latest book, "Frog and Other Essays," on the profound power of the seemingly trivial. Think: a dead pet frog, the existential dread of Zoom, and an old printer. Because apparently, those are the things that truly matter.

Fadiman's parents, both writers, apparently had a master plan to turn their kids into word nerds. They pushed books that were "a little too hard," a strategy Fadiman's father believed would stretch young minds. It seems to have worked, given her current gig at Yale.

She honed her craft at Harvard Magazine, where mentors like John Bethell would dissect her sentences line by line. A brutal, but effective, education she now inflicts (lovingly, we assume) on her own students.

Fadiman initially tackled reported nonfiction, but a difficult pregnancy at 41 led her to the "familiar essay." This form, a glorious mash-up of personal experience and deep-dive research, was apparently her literary soulmate. Because sometimes, you just need to talk about your feelings and the history of the South Polar Times.

That last one, by the way, was a magazine British explorer Robert Falcon Scott created for his men during a brutal Antarctic expedition. It reminded them of beauty and humor amidst the ice and despair. Which, if you think about it, is a pretty solid argument for finding the extraordinary in the ordinary.

The AI in the Room

Fadiman's advice for aspiring writers is beautifully simple: "What am I trying to say?" Anything that doesn't answer that, she says, gets the axe. And if you want to improve your writing in a month? Read all of E.B. White's works. Twice. She believes you'll absorb his brilliance through "osmosis." Which sounds a lot less painful than a line-by-line edit.

But not everything is cozy literary advice. Fadiman has a deep, existential dread about AI. She sees it as a "well-greased slide" into academic dishonesty, making it far too easy for students to cheat. She worries it will fundamentally alter education and even literature itself, ushering in an era where books might not be solely human creations.

Despite her concerns, her Yale students (bless their hearts) haven't yet succumbed to the AI temptation. But if she ever catches a whiff of machine-generated prose? "The day I quit my job and the day my heart gets broken," she says. Let's hope those frogs and old printers keep inspiring her students, and not the robots.