Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, now with a brand-new Afterword The conflict between a small county hospital in California and a Laotian refugee family over the care of Lia Lee, a Hmong infant with severe epilepsy, is examined in the film The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. Both Lia's parents and her doctors cared about what was best for her, yet their differences caused tragedy. The empathetic analysis of this cultural deadlock by Anne Fadiman, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest, and the Salon Book Award, is literary journalism at its best. 1982?2012 Lia Lee On August 31, 2012, Lia Lee passed away. She was thirty years old and had been in a vegetative state since the age of four. Until the day of her death, her family cared for her lovingly at home.