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On Writers and Drinking
Picador
January 2014
On Sale: December 31, 2013
352 pages
ISBN: 1250039568
EAN: 9781250039569
Kindle: B00DA7HIKK
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Biography
WHY IS IT THAT SOME OF THE GREATEST WORKS OF LITERATURE HAVE
BEEN PRODUCED BY WRITERS IN THE GRIP OF ALCOHOLISM, AN
ADDICTION THAT COST THEM PERSONAL HAPPINESS AND CAUSED HARM
TO THOSE WHO LOVED THEM?
In The Trip to Echo
Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between
creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six
extraordinary men: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway,
Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond
Carver.
All six of these writers were alcoholics, and
the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest
work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable
Feast. Often, they did their drinking together:
Hemingway and Fitzgerald ricocheting through the cafés of
Paris in the 1920s; Carver and Cheever speeding to the
liquor store in Iowa in the icy winter of
1973.
Olivia Laing grew up in an alcoholic family
herself. One spring, wanting to make sense of this
ferocious, entangling disease, she took a journey across
America that plunged her into the heart of these overlapping
lives. As she travels from Cheever’s New York to Williams’s
New Orleans, and from Hemingway’s Key West to Carver’s Port
Angeles, she pieces together a topographical map of
alcoholism, from the horrors of addiction to the miraculous
possibilities of recovery.
Beautiful, captivating,
and original, The Trip to Echo Spring strips away the
myth of the alcoholic writer to reveal the terrible price
creativity can exert.
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