IJ study archive

the hard-drinker and the teetotaller

quote

The tall, ungainly, socially challenged and hard-drinking Dr. Incandenza’s May–December marriage to one of the few bona fide bombshell-type females in North American academia, the extremely tall and high-strung but also extremely pretty and gainly and teetotalling and classy Dr. Avril Mondragon

Context

The household's split rendered in one appositive: the hard-drinking father and the teetotalling mother, the disease already sorted onto one side of the marriage. The adjective "hard-drinking" is dropped in among the neutral biographical facts, unremarked, which is exactly how the family will keep it.

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