The Wine Lover's Daughter

A Memoir

By: Anne Fadiman

Narrated by: Anne Fadiman

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, 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 Chateau Lafite-Rothschild 1904 he drank to celebrate his 80th 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.

©2017 Anne Fadiman (P)2017 Recorded Books

The wit and love of a daughter and father

I enjoyed the honesty, wit, and love expressed by the author for her father. Fadiman is also a wonderful writer and brings alive her celebrated father, Clifton Fadiman. She grapples honestly with his prejudices and flaws while illuminating his love for his children and his attainments as a writer and intellectual. She brings her own life and accomplishments alive in this memoir, but with becoming modesty. And she is rigorous in describing her efforts to build her own writing career without being overshadowed by his. I have enjoyed every book written by Anne Fadiman that I have read!

Reads as if a list

This book is an esoteric snobby list of her fathers, life events. The title is somewhat of a misnomer because the story is not really about the daughter too much and mainly about events in the father’s life story.