The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink

Shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Biography Award. 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 1920s Paris; 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' New Orleans, 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.

About the Author :
Olivia Laing's first book, To the River, was described as 'sublime' by the Times, 'magical' by the Telegraph and 'deeply intelligent' by the Literary Review. It was a book of the year in the Evening Standard, Independent and Financial Times and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Dolman Travel Book of the Year. The Trip to Echo Spring was shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Biography Award, the 2014 Transmission Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize, was widely reviewed and was also a book of the year in The Times, Observer, Metro, Economist and Times Literary Supplement. Olivia is the former Deputy Books Editor of the Observer and writes for a variety of publications, including the Observer, New Statesman, Guardian and Times Literary Supplement. She is a 2011 MacDowell Fellow and has received awards from the Arts Council and the Authors' Foundation. She was also awarded the 2014 Eccles Foundation Writer in Residence at the British Library.

Review :
Olivia Laing's writing is beautifully modulated, her tone knowledgeable yet intimate. She can evoke a state of mind as gracefully as she evokes a landscape. The Trip to Echo Spring is a book for all writers or would-be writers. It's one of the best books I've read about the creative uses of adversity: frightening but perversely inspiring The Trip to Echo Spring is original, brave and very moving. Laing's way of looking at a natural world that is free from human faults repeatedly prompts something like the "spiritual awakening" AA attendees hope for. Her insights shine with beauty yet are shaded by sympathy and compassion Laing's analysis of the complex addiction is consistently shrewd. But what makes The Trip to Echo Spring truly worthwhile is that she, like those she writes about, is a terrific writer I loved The Trip to Echo Spring. It's a beautiful book that has stayed with me in a profound way Beguiling and incisive Laing's prose is lucid and exuberant. She rejects the opportunities for humour, although some of the stories are very funny indeed; and traces rather than interrogates her subjects. She knows them intimately and the result is a thoughtful study, part literary biography, part travel memoir Beguiling, beautifully written... brilliant and original Laing is a brilliant wordsmith and this is a beautifully accomplished book Full of insight, compassion and unexpected beauty It's deliciously evocative, Laing's melancholic and lyrical style conjuring the location, before effortlessly segueing into medical facts about alcoholism, the effects on the lives of each writer, and well-chosen passages from their work. This is a highly accomplished book, and highly recommended 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 Haunting . . . a moving, troubling, gorgeously written book