Biography; Literary Non-Fiction
The Spirit Catches You is a unique piece of literary non-fiction that blends the story of one girl's life with the overarching history of her people. Pretty crafty, if you ask us.
On one hand, The Spirit Catches You simply documents Lia's story. We follow her from her birth to her epilepsy diagnosis to the final seizure that leaves her legally brain-dead to the pig sacrifice meant to bring her back.
On the other hand, the book also documents the history of the Hmong people. Lia's story is interspersed with anecdotes from Hmong history that document their culture and their path to America. Fadiman goes pretty far back—we even reach the B.C.Es. By combining the approaches of the up-close-and-personal and the societal zoom-out, Fadiman gives us the context we need to understand the many issues at play in Lia's life and the lives of the Hmong people on a broader scale, too.