The Wine Lover’s Daughter: A Memoir by Anne Fadiman
Print Length: 272 Pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: November 7, 2017
Language: English
ASIN: B071CTJ9X7
ISBN-10: 0374228086
ISBN-13: 978-0374228088
File Format: EPUB
In The Wine Lover’s Daughter, Anne Fadiman examine–with all her characteristic wit and feeling–her relationship with her father, Clifton Fadiman, a renowned literary critic, editor, and radio host whose greatest love was wine.
An appreciation of wine–along with a plummy upper-crust accent, expensive suits, and an encyclopedic knowledge of Western literature–was an essential element of Clifton Fadiman’s escape from lower-middle-class Brooklyn to swanky Manhattan. But wine was not just a class-vaulting accessory; it was an object of ardent desire. The Wine Lover’s Daughter traces the arc of a man’s infatuation from the glass of cheap Graves he drank in Paris in 1927; through the Château Lafite-Rothschild 1904 he drank to celebrate his eightieth birthday, when he and the bottle were exactly the same age; to the wines that sustained him in his last years, when he was blind but still buoyed, as always, by hedonism.
Wine is the spine of this touching memoir; the life and character of Fadiman’s father, along with her relationship with him and her own less ardent relationship with wine, are the flesh. The Wine Lover’s Daughteris a poignant exploration of love, ambition, class, family, and the pleasures of the palate by one of our finest essayists.