Anne Fadiman | Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

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Ex Libris, [1] 7; The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, [11] 80; The Wine Lover’s Daughter, [72] 14

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The Wine Lover’s Daughter | Chapter 1: Thwick

Anne Fadiman, The Wine Lover’s Daughter

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. Nearly every evening of my childhood, I watched him cut the capsule – the foil sleeve that sheathes the bottleneck – with a sharp knife. Then he plunged the bore of a butterfly corkscrew into the exact center of the cork, twirled the handle, and, after the brass levers rose like two supplicant arms, pushed them down and gently twisted out the cork. Its pop was satisfying but restrained, not the fustian whoop of a champagne cork but a well-bred thwick. He once said that the cork was one of three inventions that had proved unequivocally beneficial to the human race. (The others were the wheel and Kleenex.)

Confessions of a Common Reader | From the Slightly Foxed archives

‘Anne Fadiman recalls that Charles Lamb “once told Coleridge that he was especially fond of books containing traces of buttered muffins”’ Here at Hoxton Square we feel we may be kindred spirits with Charles Lamb, especially as the season turns and there’s a chill in the air, calling for muffins and good books to bury one’s nose in. As we come to the end of another busy working week, we’d like to take you back to where our story began: the first article of the first issue of Slightly Foxed magazine. Appropriately enough, it’s about a lifelong obsession with books. And we do hope that you, dear readers, will find a kindred spirit in Anne Fadiman.

A Vintage Life

Adam Sisman on Anne Fadiman, The Wine Lover’s Daughter

Anne Fadiman’s memoir of her father originated as one of several ideas for an article that she pitched to an editor at Harper’s magazine. ‘I think I could tell the story of my father’s life and character through wine,’ she proposed. ‘The Oenophile’s Daughter!’ he exclaimed. His suggested title was jettisoned when they discovered that hardly anyone else knew what ‘oenophile’ meant, or how to spell or pronounce it. And soon afterwards the editor parted ways with Harper’s. But the idea took root; and Anne Fadiman realized that she wanted to write a book on the subject, not an article. In many ways her eventual title, The Wine Lover’s Daughter, is a misnomer; The Wine Loving Father is a more obvious description – though of course, in telling us about her father, she also tells us about herself.

Shock Waves

Julia Keay on Anne Fadimann, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

Anyone who has ever visited another country and found the food unidentifiable, the language incomprehensible and the rules of behaviour bizarre has experienced some degree of culture shock. Sometimes it’s exciting, often it’s disconcerting, and if you get ill or lost or inadvertently cause offence it can be frightening. Anne Fadiman’s book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is about culture shock of a different order altogether. It is the story of what can happen when, even with the best of intentions on both sides, two cultures collide.

Episode 1: Kindred Spirits

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

In the first episode of The Slightly Foxed Podcast, Gail, Hazel, Steph and SF director Jim Ring meet round the kitchen table at No. 53 to remember how it all began and Veronika Hyks gives voice to Liz Robinson’s article on Anne Fadiman’s well-loved Ex Libris.

Kindred Spirits

Liz Robinson on Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris

Do you treasure ancient paperbacks, spines gone, pages browning, brittle and crumbling, held together (or not quite) with perished elastic bands, simply because you also treasure the memories they evoke as much by their physical appearance as by their contents?

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