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The Wine Lover's Daughter: A Memoir

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 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 Daughter is a poignant exploration of love, ambition, class, family, and the pleasures of the palate by one of our finest essayists.

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 272
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 978-0-374-53794-4
  • EAN
  • 9780374537944
  • Release date
  • 2018