The Wine Lover's Daughter

by Anne Fadiman

Overview

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 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374228088
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	11/07/2017
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	306,524
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

1 Thwick 3

2 Civilization 7

3 Wager 12

4 Ardt 17

5 Gods 27

6 Kismet 30

7 Homesick 34

8 Multihyphenate 39

9 Initiation 47

10 Counterfeit 51

11 Demeatballization 59

12 Milkshake 67

13 Jew 78

14 Oakling 92

15 Drunk 105

16 High 112

17 Vintage 116

18 Birthday 139

19 VIP 150

20 Impotence 181

21 Taste 186

22 Memorabilia 207

23 Port 230

Notes on Sources 237

Acknowledgments 249

Editorial Reviews

"Ours was a word-oriented family," Anne Fadiman declares on the second page of her winning memoir -- an understatement if ever there was one. Fadiman, who has written delightful bibliophilic essays (collected in Ex Libris and At Large and At Small) about building castles at age four with her father's pocket-size set of Trollope and being fed a rich diet of polysyllabic words -- courtesy of his bedtime stories about a bookworm who satisfies an appetite for sesquipedalian nutrition by chomping through dictionaries -- has at long last expanded on these charming glimpses of her bookish upbringing.

The Wine Lover's Daughter introduces Fadiman's father and kindred spirit, wordsmith and wit Clifton Fadiman (1904–99), to a new generation with a deliciously rich, well-balanced portrait. The book is centered as much on his passion for fine wine -- and her own inability to develop a taste for it -- as on his extraordinary "multihypenate" career as a longtime New Yorker book critic, emcee of the wildly popular NBC radio quiz show Information Please, Book-of-the-Month Club judge, and author of Wally the Wordworm and numerous literary anthologies, all sadly out of print.

Fadiman's first line sets the tone: "My father was a lousy driver and a two-finger typist, but he could open a wine bottle as deftly as any swain ever undressed his lover." That "swain" is pure Fadiman. So, too, are her astute comments about "Brief History of a Love Affair," her father's introduction to The Joys of Wine, the massive tome he co-authored with Sam Aaron, his friend and wine merchant (whom he jokingly called "the vintner of my discontent"): "The amorous vocabulary wasn't a metaphor," she writes. "Aside from books, he loved nothing -- and no one -- longer, more ardently, or more faithfully than he loved wine."

But Fadiman's memoir uncorks much more than a remembrance of drinks past or a daughter's filial intoxication. By allowing her memories to ripen over the many years since her father's death in 1999, the result is a superbly evolved, less tannic pour. Organized into what she does best -- twenty-three short essays, just shy of two cases -- Fadiman tackles some difficult aspects of her legacy. The bitterness she might have felt about, say, her father's request after he'd gone blind at eighty-eight for her to call two women -- who she quickly realized were his lovers -- and tell them what had happened has been mellowed by time. The same goes for his "reflexively condescending" sexism. She somewhat evasively calls her parents' marriage "imperfect but interesting." One hopes she'll profile her mother, Annalee Whitmore Jacoby Fadiman, who died in 2002, more thoroughly in another book. Like her daughter, Annalee preferred milkshakes to wine, but unlike her daughter, she gave up her writing career -- which included early success as a Hollywood screenwriter and as a rare female reporter in China during WWII -- after having children.

Fadiman delves more deeply into her father's insecurities than into his relationships with women. She deftly traces the anti-Semitism he faced from both within and without, which fueled his social- climbing ambition and workaholism but also contributed to his sense of being an outsider. Born in Brooklyn in 1904 to parents from Minsk and Belarus, he strove early on to distance himself from his lower-middle-class Jewish origins after realizing "that things were run by people who spoke well and who were not Jewish, not poor, and not ugly." By the time he reached Columbia University, he had developed a vast knowledge of literature, a sharp wit, a plummy "hypercultivated voice," and an envy and passion for "all things fabricated with skill and effort" -- including art, books, foods, and, eventually, wine. Yet, despite his brilliance, he was denied a teaching position, told by Columbia's English Department head, "We have room for only one Jew, and we have chosen Mr. Trilling." Fadiman writes that her father never got over it.

The Wine Lover's Daughter also addresses what Fadiman calls the oakling dilemma -- growing up in the shadow of a famous parent who "grabs the sunlight." Her father, forty-nine when she was born, fortunately lived long enough to appreciate her early books, including her NBCC prizewinner, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down -- though not long enough to see her join the faculty of an Ivy League college, his dream. (Fadiman has taught nonfiction writing at Yale since 2005.)

Underpinning Fadiman's reckoning with her father's legacy also involves gauging their shared sources of pleasure -- including doggerel, word games, and cheese -- as well as their differences, most pointedly her love of the outdoors and his love of wine. Despite many humorously recounted attempts, she just can't -- well, swallow it. So, as she's done before in far-reaching essays about a few of her favorite things -- ice cream, coffee, mail -- she doggedly investigates further. She goes so far as to consult with scientists at Cornell and Yale who subject her recalcitrant taste buds to various tests. The hilarious quest encapsulates her strengths as a reporter and essayist: persistence, humor, clarity, and intelligence. The upshot: she discovers that her heavily papillated tongue is highly sensitive to sourness and bitterness, which is why mere alcohol doesn't thrill her at all and radishes hit her "more like a bee-sting than a food." Vindicated yet disappointed, she comments: "So there it was. I didn't taste what my father tasted."

Even Fadiman's notes on her sources are fascinating. "This book contains no reconstructed or imagined quotations," she states proudly. She has relied on letters, essays, transcribed interview tapes -- plus notes she was taking all along, right down to her father's last utterances. She says she changed her original title, The Oenophile's Daughter, when she "discovered that hardly anyone knew how to spell, pronounce, or define 'oenophile'nbsp;" -- and was consoled when she realized that similar problems killed Speak, Mnemosyne, Nabokov's original title for Speak, Memory. Such are the trials of a highbrow, sesquipedalian vocabulary. But, like her father, Fadiman has that rare ability to wear her erudition lightly. And what he said about wine also applies to The Wine Lover's Daughter: it is a delectable ode to cultivation and civilization.

Heller McAlpin is a New York–based critic who reviews books for NPR.org, The Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, and other publications.

Reviewer: Heller McAlpin

The Barnes & Noble Review

Turning her keen powers of observation to her father's love of wine, Fadiman delivers an illuminating and nuanced case study in connoisseurship that probes the dazzling hedonism and gnawing anxieties that fuel an obsession with fermented grape juice…While the canon of literary memoirs contains numerous examples of writers grappling with family trauma or struggle, Fadiman breaks with the genre in offering a portrait of a parental relationship that—differing opinions on Bordeaux aside—is, well, happy. Indeed, the book is also a study of a daughter's love for her father—reverential, deferential, apt to make an agnosticism for wine seem like a significant betrayal. Embedded within is the story of a celebrated writer honoring someone she considers a great, perhaps overlooked, talent, and Fadiman profiles her father with a tenderness that suggests she hopes readers will, in the final calculus, share her high esteem for him.

The New York Times Book Review - Bianca Bosker

If Anne Fadiman’s book about her father were a wine, it would merit a ‘100’ rating, along with all the oeno-superlatives:‘smooth,’ ‘elegant,’ ‘brilliant,’ ‘rounded,’ ‘with a dazzling, heart-warming finish.’ But as it is a book and not a wine, let’s call it what it is: a stunning, original, beautifully written, clear-eyed yet tear-inducing account of a daughter’s love for her famous father; and into the bargain, the best family memoir yet to come out of the Baby Boom generation.” —Christopher Buckley

“The ostensible object of Anne Fadiman’s wonderful new book is the wine cellar of her father, the once-omnipresent critic Clifton Fadiman. But its real subjects include the insecurities of American Jews, the glories of mid-century ‘middlebrow’ culture, and, above all, the always intricate, often exasperated, and finally deeply tender relation of father and daughter.” —Adam Gopnik

“This book is as good and rich as one would hope, no small thing, given it's written by one of the best essayists of our time about her father, one of the more interesting critics of another. Uncork this book and watch one master go to work on another, a man she observed all her life with an affectionate but also a writer's eye. I was reminded reading it of what the man himself once wrote about tasting a great vintage, that it was ‘to savor a droplet of the river of human history.’” —John Jeremiah Sullivan

“[Clifton] Fadiman was something of an encyclopedia himself, his mind a magpie’s nest of odd facts and glittering insights that he summoned with seeming ease as a great explainer of literature and culture to popular audiences . . . [A] fondly drawn portrait . . . As the title suggests, [Anne Fadiman’s] book is ostensibly about Clifton Fadiman’s love affair with wine, although she writes about his oenophilic odyssey as a way to write about many other things: his ideals, his affectionate if complicated relationship with her, and his lifelong struggle to transcend his origins.” —Danny Heitman, The Wall Street Journal

“A wonderfully engaging memoir . . . Consistently absorbing . . . You will be hard-pressed to stop reading . . . Anne Fadiman’s prose, like a proper gentleman’s suit, is beautifully tailored without drawing attention to itself.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

“In this crisp, scintillating, amusing, and affecting memoir, Anne incisively and lovingly portrays her brilliant and vital father and brings into fresh focus the dynamic world of twentieth-century books and America’s discovery of wine.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

“The Wine Lover's Daughter is a standout—possibly the best memoir, and one of the best books, this reviewer has read in 2017 . . . A fascinating book with something to interest anyone; a pure reading pleasure.” —Derek Sanderson, Library Journal (starred review)

“Fadiman decants a harmonious blend of biography, wine lore, and memoir in this account of a literary daughter's relationship with her celebrated literary father . . . Reading this daughter's graceful, often melodious billet-doux to her father is not unlike imbibing several equally felicitous glasses of wine.” —Kirkus

From the Publisher

★ 10/15/2017
Essayist (At Large and at Small; Ex Libris) and author (The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down) Fadiman's wonderful memoir examines herself, her father, her relationship with her father, wine, books, family, and much more. Clifton Fadiman had a long and distinguished career as a radio and TV host and book reviewer. But his main passion, besides books, was wine. Those familiar with the author's essays will recognize her polymath mind and tangential style, and those unfamiliar will find it delightful to encounter for the first time. How she manages to fit her own life, her father's life, her marriage, a primer on wine, the scientific study of taste, and many other subjects into such a slim volume is mind-boggling, something this reviewer is still trying to comprehend. VERDICT A fascinating book with something to interest anyone; a pure reading pleasure. [See "Reconciling Histories, Unraveling Mysteries," ow.ly/IGNv30fklIH].—Derek Sanderson, Mount Saint Mary Coll., Newburgh, NY

Library Journal

2017-07-24
Fadiman (At Large and at Small: Confessions of a Literary Hedonist, 2008, etc.) decants a harmonious blend of biography, wine lore, and memoir in this account of a literary daughter's relationship with her celebrated literary father.Born into a secular Jewish family in Brooklyn, Clifton Fadiman (1904-1999) spent his adult life submerging that identity beneath WASP sensibilities and pursuits. His belief that Jewishness was a cultural and career impediment and his envy of WASP privilege were powerful motivators to escape his origins, in the 1930s and beyond. As revealed by his daughter, Fadiman's was almost entirely a life of the mind. Physically clumsy, he was unacquainted with much of life beyond its gustatory or literary pleasures. Though thwarted in his desire to become an academic, he emerged as a self-invented, ardent public intellectual of the first rank. Before the age of 30, he had served as editor-in-chief at Simon & Schuster and head of the book review section at the New Yorker. His friends and colleagues were a who's who of celebrated litterateurs of the time, and the gleam of a life in letters was not lost on his daughter. Despite considerable renown, the refined yet self-effacing Fadiman always regarded himself as an outsider and, in darker moments, even an impostor. The author's mother, by contrast, was of mixed Presbyterian and Mormon stock, an accomplished journalist and screenwriter who relinquished her career to marriage. Anne Fadiman, writer-in-residence at Yale and winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award, grew up in a prosperous, secular, decidedly rational household. Always there were books and a civilizing force embodied by wine, a taste for which she did not share. In limning her father, Fadiman also lays a gradual accretion of detail about herself, but she is careful never to eclipse his (regrettably) diminished star. Reading this daughter's graceful, often melodious billet-doux to her father is not unlike imbibing several equally felicitous glasses of wine, their salutary effects leaving one pleasantly sated.

Kirkus Reviews