The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking

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.