About the Book
Why were so many authors of the greatest works of literature consumed by alcoholism? In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing takes a journey across America, examining the links between creativity and drink in the overlapping work and lives of six extraordinary men: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever and Raymond Carver.
From Hemingway's Key West to Williams's New Orleans, Laing pieces together a topographical map of alcoholism, and strips away the tangle of mythology to reveal the terrible price creativity can exert.
About the Author :
Olivia Laing is an internationally acclaimed writer and critic. They're the author of eight books, including Funny Weather, Everybody and the Sunday Times number one bestseller The Garden Against Time. Laing's first novel, Crudo, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and in 2018 they were awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. They're an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts and their books have been translated into twenty-one languages. Their latest novel is The Silver Book.
@olivialanguage | olivialaing.com
Review :
One of the best books I've read about the creative uses of adversity: frightening but perversely inspiring
A work of art, with a voice and a mood all its own.
Original, brave and very moving . . . Her insights shine with beauty yet are shaded by sympathy and compassion
A terrific writer
Full of insight, compassion and unexpected beauty
Haunting . . . a moving, troubling, gorgeously written book
Beguiling, beautifully written . . . brilliant and original
Beguiling and incisive
Laing's prose is lucid and exuberant
Laing is a brilliant wordsmith and this is a beautifully accomplished book
Deliciously evocative . . . This is a highly accomplished book
I loved The Trip to Echo Spring. It's a beautiful book that has stayed with me in a profound way
A triumphant exercise in creative reading in which diary entries, letters, poems, stories and plays are woven together to explore deep, interconnected themes of dependence, denial and self-destructiveness. It is a testimony to this book's compelling power that having finished it, I immediately wanted to read it again
While there is no straightforward answer to why writers drink, Laing explores the causes in admirable detail and astonishingly good prose that rivals the output of the authors she is writing about
Laing is a fine and stylish travel writer, with a sharp eye for passing detail and an acute ear for oddly amusing conversations
Laing's descriptions of the American landscape, as she travels south from New York to New Orleans and Key West, and then north up to St Paul and Port Angeles, are a joy to read. She has a keen eye for the details of American streets... She captures the discomfort of long train journeys... and evokes the smells and sounds of an unknown city. A thunderstorm is recorded in intimate detail; the snatched conversations of fellow travellers are threaded into her narrative . . . there is much to enjoy in this trip across America. In Ms Laing's hands these famously complicated men become fragile, and terribly human
Laing writes so well, so seductively in fact, that this deconstructed way of pursuing a story works brilliantly again
Laing is often perceptive. She has a flair for elegant, cursive summaries of these various bodies of work and the shaping pressures of drink upon them
A wonderful read
In pages of great lyric beauty, Laing travels in the footsteps of Cheever and company across America from New York to New Orleans. At times the writing shows a Hemingway influence ('In Alabama the earth was red and there was wisteria in the trees'); at others, a demotic Raymond Carver cut ('The hell with it'). The book, a hybrid of travel and literary criticism, is always engaging to read, as it casts a humane eye on the accidents, illness, social impairment and other damage caused by drink to the poet Berryman in particular, whose outraged innards and pale, wayworn face showed the horror of his multi-day benders and the moaning after the night before
Laing makes us care about these writers' sufferings, the self-wreaked ravages on vital organs, the inexorable blackings-out of genius. But she makes us cherish even more what they left behind: literature soaked with "the power to map the more difficult regions of human experience"
The book's subtitle, Why Writers Drink, undersells Laing's achievement. She has produced not an answer to a glib question, but a nuanced portrait - via biography, memoir, analysis - of the urge of the hyperarticulate to get raving drunk... The book achieves its greatest force through Laing's mix of intellect and intuition, which often recalls the New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm
Olivia Laing [is] a rising English critic who matches smart textual analysis of 20th-century greats with down-and-dirty ferreting around the places where they lived and worked... This is a superb idea, exceptionally well executed
Why read it? For its intoxicating prose and maverick spirit
An elegant rumination on what it is that leads writers to take up the bottle
By turns uplifting, horrific, and desperately sad, this is a fascinating, lyrical and original approach to addiction
Laing's lively, stylistically original and sometimes acutely personal study of writers and alcohol avoids literary cliché while coaxing out the subtext of their writings to show the causes and effects of addiction
[A] charming and gusto-driven look at the alcoholic insanity of six famous writers . . . There is much to learn from Laing's supple scholarship-and much to enjoy, too, in her obvious passion and engagement
Juicy and sensitive
Fascinating
Enthralling
It's a fascinating book and at its heart is the lasting work of those literary giants
What gives her book its brilliance and originality [is] the quality of the writing
Wonderful . . . this book is something more than a romantic celebration of the artist-souse
Olivia Laing's elegant cocktail of biography and travelogue reflects on the liquor-sodden works of six American writers while she crosses the States tipsily by rail
A charming and gusto-driven look at the alcoholic insanity of six famous authors: John Cheever, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Carver
