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    The Wine Lover's Daughter: A Memoir
    The Wine Lover's Daughter: A Memoir
    The Wine Lover's Daughter: A Memoir
    Audiobook6 hours

    The Wine Lover's Daughter: A Memoir

    Written by Anne Fadiman

    Narrated by Anne Fadiman

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    About this audiobook

    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 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateNov 7, 2017
    ISBN9781501968853
    Author

    Anne Fadiman

    Anne Fadiman is the author of The Wine Lover's Daughter, a memoir about her father (FSG, 2017). Her first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (FSG, 1997), won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Salon Book Award. Fadiman has also written two essay collections, At Large and At Small and Ex Libris, and is the editor of Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love (all published by FSG). She is the Francis Writer-in-Residence at Yale.

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    Reviews for The Wine Lover's Daughter

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    • 5/5
      What a sweet book about the author's relationship with her famous father but really about memory, legacy and how well we think/wish we know someone. I don't care a whit about wine and this book is still an absolute joy to spend time with.
    • 2/5
      I did not know a lot about Clifton Fadiman when I came across this book, other than I have his book on what an individual should read to complete their literary education in life. I have taken on a number of these tomes in this quest but still have a ways to go.This particular book is a memoir and tribute to this man by his daughter Anne and ties together his life with not only his literary career but his deep and abiding love for wine. He seems to have been quite the collector and imbiber of this ageless elixir and we are educated as to some of the better and rarer varieties. Along with this we get an insight from his daughter in some of his accomplishments, foibles, and struggles.There is quite a bit her to admire about the love of a daughter for her father which is a nice thing. On the flipside however I felt there might have been some things revealed that might have been best kept private. Also the constant theme of wine seems to run its course to the point where she gets into a detailed discussion of her taste bud sensitivities and why she was not as into the wine thing as her father. Aside from that the book was a well written and thoughtful tribute.
    • 4/5
      Despite my “hail fellow, well met!” toward alcohol in general, I'm not a big wine person. That is, I'm perfectly happy to drink grocery store zinfandels and moscatos which Clifton Fadiman would have scorned to pour into his stew (if he had cooked, which, as his daughter tells us, he didn't), but I'd rather have whiskey or rum (or gin or vodka!). Still, I enjoyed “The Wine Lover's Daughter” very much. Even the parts about wine, which were painlessly instructive. While Fadiman spends plenty of time on wine and her dismay over her failure to enjoy the thing which, along with books, her father loved most, this is a memoir, a loving but clear-eyed appreciation of her father's life. As the daughter of another New York secular Jew and cultural and intellectual snob (though my father was born thirty-eight years later, graduated from Cornell rather than Columbia, and enjoys the outdoors!), I was by turns fascinated and horrified by the casual institutionalized antisemitism Anne Fadiman's father endured (I'd heard the story of how he was turned down for a professorship in the Columbia English department because they had hired Lionel Trilling and “We have room for only one Jew” before, but it's still awful). Fadiman doesn't dwell excessively on the negative, though (but enough to illuminate the ways she believes her father's quirks were responses to the prejudices of society), offering a portrait of a gregarious, intellectually vigorous, ambitious, generous man who was passionate about sharing his enthusiasms – for books, wine, and civilized living – with as wide an audience as possible.
    • 4/5
      I loved her two previous books "When the Spirit Catches You..." and Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, but I found this more superficially written and a bit boring. (Even though I enjoy and know a bit about wine)
    • 4/5
      For anyone interested in wines or the relationships between fathers and daughters, this is a most engaging memoir. In addition, the glimpse into the lives of a celebrity family headed by such a literary luminary as Clifton Fadiman is fascinating. The lifestyle of a certain social segment (think New Yorker contributors and intellectuals of means in the 50's and 60's) is portrayed with clear eyes and affection by Anne Fadiman. Understanding her father's humble background and its influence on the man he became adds poignancy to Fadiman's recollections, and it is indeed refreshing to read of a family whose members liked each other and apparently hid no dark secrets. At times the information about wines became quite technical, which might not appeal to all readers, but there was a lot to be learned about wine collecting and appreciation.