The Wine Lover's Daughter: A Memoir

A new 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, the celebrated multihyphenate and lover of wine Clifton Fadiman. A renowned literary critic, editor, and radio host, Clifton was born in Brooklyn, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, and spent the rest of his life trying to get away from it.
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 s escape from lower-middle-class Brooklyn to swanky Manhattan. The Wine Lover's Daughter traces the arc of a man's infatuation, from the glass of cheap Graves he drank in 1927 in a Parisian department store; to the Chateau 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 during the last years of his life, when he was blind but still buoyed, as he had always been, 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. A poignant and thoughtful exploration of love, ambition, class, family, and the pleasures of the palate, The Wine Lover's Daughter is a splendid return to form by one of our finest essayists.