The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking
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A New York Times Notable Book of 2014 A Time Magazine Notable Book of 2014 Olivia Laing's widely acclaimed account of how writers in the grip of alcoholism created some of the greatest works of American literature In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing takes a journey across America, examining the links between creativity and alcohol in the work and lives of six extraordinary men: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. Captivating and highly 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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My second Olivia Laing, her second book, about the alcoholism that wracked the lives of some of the great American writers - Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Berryman, Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Cheever. Laing explores how their addictions affected their lives and by extension their writing, for good and for bad, via a mix of memoir, travelogue, and biography; a style she established in To A River and hones to perfection here. My only complaint about this book is that there were plenty of great American female authors that could have been included - I'd love to have read Laing's take on Anne Sexton, Shirley Jackson, or Dorothy Parker - and I didn't really understand her reasoning for excluding them.