Wine Girl: A sommelier's tale of making it in the toxic world of fine dining Hardcover – 2 April 2020
by
Victoria James (Author)
4.3 out of 5 stars 318 ratings
1.0 out of 5 stars The First Half of This Book Isn't Factual in the Slightest
Reviewed in the United States on 12 September 2021
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I'm Victoria's oldest sister (not mentioned in the book due to my lawyer telling her to leave me out). My father lost his job after this book came out and our family was torn in two. I held his hands many times as he cried and hit low points I'd never seen before. I wrote a review on this previously that had over 400 likes, but Amazon removed it for some reason along with most of my other reviews. They tell me it's a glitch and they are working to put it back, but in the meantime, I felt it important to repeat some things.
My father made well over 6 figures a year most of our childhood. We grew up in a 5-6 bedroom houses and never had to share a bedroom. We had more food than we knew what to do with (believe me, I ate it all). I don't know what the claims of pickle juice and crackers being all we had to eat came from. We had nannies who lived with us and ate just fine. We were beyond privileged.
Did my father have a drinking issue? Yes, there was a time when he struggled with this after he was in one of the tower that collapsed in NYC on 9/11. Bodies landed around him. He almost died. He walked from NYC to NJ and we didn't know until 10pm that night when he walked in the door covered in white ash that he'd survived. He was a single father at that point and we had a nanny, so he just had to "get back to normal" after that. He had to keep working and providing for his family. He didn't get help or get time off to work on that trauma. So, yeah, he turned to alcohol for a while. None of that is mentioned in the book. Victoria portrays him as a one dimensional character and she's this perfect hero.
She makes reference after reference to "taking care of our family." My sisters all paid for their own colleges or got free rides. We never had to buy our own food/clothes/etc unless it was something fun or extra we wanted. We all had full health insurance through my father until we were 26 years old, of which I know 100% Victoria utilized. She claims in the book she had no health insurance, but there are literally a ton of email exchanges between her and my dad about her asking for help getting her acupuncture covered by insurance because that was the only treatment our insurance denied and she liked that a lot.
Our mother isn't mentioned in the book much except as being mentally ill and that her journals and documents somehow prove Victoria's story to be true (despite discrediting her in the same sentence due to her mental illness). My mother is very ill, and her journals are a reflection of that. She had extreme postpartum psychosis after pregnancies and left when our youngest sister was 2 months old. I raised her after that, not Victoria. I have the mothers day cards from our youngest sister to prove that and tons of aunts and cousins who will attest to that. My mother has pretty severe autism and she struggles with a lot of personal connections, but she's not a monster either, even though, yeah, all of us have been hurt by her neglect and absence. Myself especially, despite trying to give her grace for her limitations.
She says my brother was forcefully hospitalized by my father and taken in an ambulance against his will. What actually happened was my brother burned our basement down when he was playing with matches. Because of the property damage monetary amount and that this wasn't his first go at this, the police/fire marshall gave my father two options: mental health assessment or legal charges. My father had to make the awful decision to drive my brother to the hospital and have him evaluated where the professionals decided he needed to be admitted. An awful situation, for sure, but not my father's fault.
Honestly, there's so much more but I won't list it all. You can Google things for yourself to see how inaccurate this is. In fact, most of the reviews on this book question the validity and they didn't even know us. That says something.
Family isn't perfect. I'm very very far from perfect. I was abused by a principal at school when I was a child and turned very angry and bitter after that and took that out on my siblings and myself. My parents had a hard time figuring out how to help me. But, it's not okay for Victoria to paint a picture of a childhood that absolutely did not happen in order to try and paint herself the hero. Even the stories she tells about her sexual assaults are so vastly different than what she reported to us back then or to the police. It just doesn't make any sense.
There are so many people who struggle in the world with REAL issues of neglect and abuse. We had some painful times, without a doubt. But it is dismissive and belittling to pretend we were working class or anything below completely privileged. It's dismissive and cruel to attack my father for his actions when he was a human being struggling being a single parent after 9/11. Victoria told my father she said "nothing negative about him in the book" and promised to come show it to him a month before publication. He never heard from her again. He found out she was having a child via an Instagram post along with everyone else in our family. He's never been allowed to meet his granddaughter, despite being a loving and doting grandfather to his other grandchild. The pain is gut wrenching to watch this all unfold.
Where's the self-reflection? Where's the humanity and flawed aspects of everyone? Where's the realizations of how her eight years of heavy drug use and dating unhealthy, toxic men led to choosing partners who continue to degrade her and look down on her? A husband who cuts her off from her family and screams and lunges at her sister two days after her sister was beaten by her now-ex husband? You cannot write a memoir and pretend to be a hero without showing how you've learned and grown from your experiences. This memoir is just a list of all the terrible (and mostly untrue) things that happened to her and how she succeeded anyway despite hurting dozens of people in the process. That's not okay. That's not truth.
Do better, Victoria. This isn't okay.
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