“Uncorking Secrets: How Hannah Selinger’s ‘Cellar Rat’ Takes You on a Thrilling Journey Through Wine and Intrigue”
Before we get to those scenes, the chapter opens with an account of the seed of trauma planted at the hands of her stepfather, who chased her around the house and sometimes grabbed her by the roots of her hair. “This man, this adult man at 6 feet 4 inches, bringing a rag-doll little girl up to her bedroom, for she had been bad, in whatever capacity bad means when you are a child. And yet, when it was over, I came crawling back, as children do, desperate for this love.”
Here, we understand why she stayed in restaurants, beyond the addictive, electric rush of working a service; restaurant work has a hold on Selinger because she does not think she deserves to be treated better. It is yet another powerful force in her life from which she is trying to wrest love and approval. She writes “The punishment of restaurants felt familiar. I came back, again and again, to places that punched me down, to places that brought me back to the dynamic that, unhealthily, mimicked the one that I had been brought up in.”
