In the great essay “The Joy of Sesquipedilians,” from your book Ex Libris, Confessions of a Common Reader, you discuss long and little-known words; your family playing as “Fadiman U.” from the living room, pitching their wits against the academic teams on the TV game show G.E. College Bowl; and the stories your father, Clifton Fadiman, told about Wally, the bookworm who loved the “high-caloric morsels” of the dictionary. How did your family help shape your love of literature, and how did you become the writer that you are?

Who knows if it was nature or nurture? Whether it was their DNA or their interest in books, both of my parents had such a gigantic influence on my writing that it’s impossible to imagine my life path had I grown up in a different family. I was surrounded by shelves that held 7,000 books; my brother and I built castles from our father’s 22-volume set of Trollope; our parents both read to us; the Fadiman dinner-table conversations were larded with long words and literary references.

We oaklings — the writer children of writer parents — are generally grateful for what our oaks gave us but eager to emerge from their shadows.

My parents were equally strong influences. I’m both a reporter and an essayist. You might say that my first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (a work of reportage), sprang more from my mother, the first woman war correspondent in China, and that the next two books, Ex Libris and At Large and At Small (essay collections) sprang more from my father, an essayist and critic.

Literary legacies are a gift, but they can also be inhibiting. I recently wrote an essay called “The Oakling and the Oak,” about the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his relationship with his elder son, Hartley, also a poet. Hartley’s readers assumed that anything good about his work must have come straight from his father, as if Hartley was incapable of originality. The title came from an 1833 review that praised Hartley’s poetry for embodying “no trivial inheritance of his father’s genius” but also quoted the saying that “the oakling withers beneath the shadow of the oak.” We oaklings — the writer children of writer parents — are generally grateful for what our oaks gave us but eager to emerge from their shadows.

There is a great quote from an interview you once gave to The Atlantic Online: “The most important thing when starting out with essay writing is to find a voice with which you’re comfortable. You need to find a persona that is very much like you, but slightly caricatured. Think of it as your own voice turned up slightly in volume…. Once you’ve found that voice, you’ll discover that the essay is something you can be serious or funny with, or both.” Is the familiar essay making a comeback?

More writers are taking up the essay. The Best American Essays series continues to be successful, and although essay collections are rarely bestsellers, more are published and read today than they were twenty or thirty years ago. Whether writers are taking up the familiar essay–a particular subset of the personal essay that’s about the writer but also about a subject, often a familiar one–is another question. All I can say is that I enjoy reading and writing familiar essays myself. The preface to At Large and At Small explains some of the reasons why.

Personal essays — a larger category — have enjoyed a resurgence in the last couple of decades because the rise of the contemporary memoir has sparked an interest in first-person writing of all lengths.