Reading, Thinking, Writing, Ingesting

"I think they are sanctuaries....They are sanctuaries for me also as a writer. When I'm writing one of these, I pretty much stop doing everything else for two or three weeks and lose myself in the subject, so I write only about things that I'm really interested in and want to know more about. I do nothing during those two or three weeks but read and think and then write about that subject. Or, in the case of a couple of these that were about food — coffee and ice cream — ingest, in addition to reading, thinking, and writing. [Laughs] It's good that I didn't spend more than three weeks on the ice cream essay; otherwise, I would have had a major obesity problem by the end. "

- Anne Fadiman on the art of the essay