The Wine Lover's Daughter: A Memoir

By Anne Fadiman

Book Overview

A memoir by the celebrated essayist that explores her relationship with her father, a lover of wine

In The Wine Lover's Daughter, Anne Fadiman examines--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 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 Ch?teau 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 Daughter is a poignant exploration of love, ambition, class, family, and the pleasures of the palate by one of our finest essayists.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374537941
• ISBN13: 9780374537944
• Release Date: November 2018
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.1" x 7.5"