Olivia Laing - The Trip to Echo Spring

In The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers
and Drinking ($26.00) Olivia Laing examines the link
between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six of America’s
finest writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John
Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. All six of these men 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
cafes 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.

Olivia Laing is the author of To the
River, published by Canongate to critical acclaim, and shortlisted for the
Ondaatje Prize. She was deputy books editor of the Observer, and writes
for The Guardian, New Statesman, and The Times Literary
Supplement, among other publications. She lives in Cambridge.