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Reviews of The Trip to Echo Spring by Olivia Laing

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The Trip to Echo Spring

On Writers and Drinking

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• First Published:
• Dec 31, 2013, 352 pages
• Oct 2014, 352 pages

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About This Book

Book summary.

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 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.

1 ECHO SPRING

HERE’S A THING. IOWA CITY, 1973. Two men in a car, a Ford Falcon convertible that’s seen better days. It’s winter, the kind of cold that hurts bones and lungs, that reddens knuckles, makes noses run. If you could, by some devoted act of seeing, crane in through the window as they rattle by, you’d see the older man, the one in the passenger seat, has forgotten to put on his socks. He’s wearing penny loafers on bare feet, oblivious to the cold, like a prep school boy on a summer jaunt. In fact you could mistake him for a boy: slight, in Brooks Brothers tweeds and flannel trousers, his hair immaculately combed. Only his face betrays him, collapsed into hangdog folds. The other man is bigger, burlier, thirty-five. Sideburns, bad teeth, a ragged sweater open at the elbow. It’s not quite nine a.m. They turn off the highway and pull into the parking lot of the state liquor store. The clerk’s out front, keys glinting in his hand. Seeing him,...

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Reader reviews, bookbrowse review.

My affection for this book grew slowly. Laing liberally mingles her present travels, her own past exposure to alcoholism with the lives and writings of the featured writers. This complex layering initially intimidated, and at times, confused me. But as I read, I grew accustomed to the complex rhythm, then became happily absorbed by it. This splintered narrative might not be for every reader; it is ultimately effective, however, in exposing just that same characteristic in the lives - and sometimes written words - of those controlled by drink... continued

Full Review (606 words) This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access, become a member today .

(Reviewed by Stacey Brownlie ).

Beyond the Book

Six authors and alcohol.

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• Jan. 5, 2014

In “The Sutton Place Story,” John Cheever describes Deborah, “not quite 3 years old,” who, because of her home environment, “had naturally come to assume that cocktails were the axis of the adult world. She made Martinis in the sand pile and thought all the illustrations of cups, goblets, and glasses in her nursery books were filled with old-fashioneds.” Cheever and five other writers who had alcohol much on their minds (and in their livers) are brought together in Olivia Laing’s “The Trip to Echo Spring,” a combination of literary analysis, memoir and travelogue that is most beguiling and incisive when rambling through the work and lives of Cheever, Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams and John Berryman.

Ms. Laing starts with Cheever and Carver at a liquor store before 9 a.m. on a frozen day in Iowa City, where they were teaching, in 1973. Cheever, 61 at the time, is “wearing penny loafers on bare feet, oblivious to the cold, like a prep school boy on a summer jaunt.” Soon we’re effortlessly moved to an evaluation of Cheever’s potent, discombobulating story “The Swimmer,” in which, as Ms. Laing puts it, “time is slopping around like gin in a glass.”

It does some slopping, too, in this book, which moves between the lives of its subjects in a frequent but not jarring way. (The book’s title refers to a line in Williams’s play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” when a character calls a visit to the liquor cabinet “a little short trip to Echo Spring,” Echo Spring being a brand of bourbon.)

“I wanted to know what made a person drink and what it did to them,” Ms. Laing writes early on. “More specifically I wanted to know why writers drink, and what effect this stew of spirits has had upon the body of literature itself.” Those are complex, even impossible questions, and it’s a credit to Ms. Laing’s book that it succeeds despite inevitably finding more mystery and contradiction than answers.

Cheever and Williams first used alcohol “to quell,” Ms. Laing writes, “acute social anxiety.” It worked, until it didn’t. Hemingway got at drink’s more painkilling effect in a letter to a friend: “Trouble was all my life when things were really bad I could always take a drink and right away they were much better.”

This is not an experience unique to great writers. For every pickled poet, there are a thousand troubled souls who haven’t read a book in years but feel the need for a stiff one at sundown, or earlier. So what if anything makes the alcoholism of writers worth studying as a separate category?

Perhaps only their eloquent view of the condition. Berryman’s “The Dream Songs,” his most famous work, is a series of poems narrated by a drinker named Henry, who Ms. Laing calls “a man in a confession booth, hungry for solace of all kinds, berating, like Job, a God he can’t quite admit either to or in.” Cheever’s 1977 novel “Falconer,” finished after its author finally got sober, features a Cheever-like character named Farragut who endures prison before escaping and experiencing a “Lazarus-like return to life,” as Ms. Laing describes it. Her reading of the novel is one of her finest moments. She writes: “The act of liberating Farragut seemed to ripple back into Cheever’s own life, buoying him up even as he set it down. It was a confirmation and testament of his own liberation, but also a way of getting ahead of himself, of creating a fantasy he could then, in some magical way, be braced by; even inhabit.”

Berryman’s last years, grippingly recounted here, were much starker. He lurched to and from rehab, eventually hurling himself from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis. (“His body was identified by a blank check in his pocket and the name on his broken glasses.”)

Ms. Laing’s book sends you scrambling for others; in this case, not just the primary material — “The Dream Songs,” Cheever’s stories and diaries, the fiction of Hemingway and Fitzgerald — but more obscure fare, like Berryman’s letters to his mother or “Poets in Their Youth,” a memoir by Eileen Simpson , Berryman’s first wife.

But even the best stretches of Ms. Laing’s book are interrupted by problematic, if not fatal, authorial choices. She was partly inspired by the drinking problem of Diana, her mother’s partner when Ms. Laing was a child. It’s no reader’s place to judge the effect of that alcoholism on Ms. Laing — she says it had “long-reaching consequences in the relationships of my adult life,” and surely it did — but on the page, its import simply doesn’t come alive.

Nor is it entirely satisfying that Ms. Laing, who is British, chose to travel by train to “plot the course of some of these restless lives by way of a physical journey across America.” Ms. Laing never explains why the focus is entirely on the United States, but she’s clearly taken with these particular writers and romanticizes the vast American landscape as a place made for rumination. Her journey never feels as cheap as a gimmick, and the prose doesn’t suffer in dispatches from stops like Key West, Fla., and New Orleans. But it’s unclear why we need to hear of stray conversations among other train passengers, or that Ms. Laing spent a night’s sleep in New York dreaming of “a cat with raspberries tangled in its fur.”

What lingers is the complexity of the problems that dominated these authors’ life and work, and how hard it is precisely to place alcohol in that emotional matrix, even if its physical effects became devastatingly clear. The two suicides in Ms. Laing’s book — Berryman and Hemingway — were the sons of fathers who had killed themselves. Carver and Cheever each dried out and died of cancer, Carver at 50. Williams’s death at 71 was drug related, and Fitzgerald suffered a fatal heart attack at 44. Asked by The Paris Review in 1983 if alcohol was “in any way an inspiration,” Carver responded: “My God, no! I hope I’ve made that clear.”

THE TRIP TO ECHO SPRING

On writers and drinking.

By Olivia Laing

Illustrated. 340 pages. Picador. $26.

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The Trip to Echo Spring

• On Writers and Drinking
• By: Olivia Laing
• Narrated by: Kate Reading
• Length: 10 hrs and 34 mins
• 4.4 out of 5 stars 4.4 (125 ratings)

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Publisher's summary

Olivia Laing's widely acclaimed account of why some of the best literature has been created by writers in the grip of alcoholism

In The Trip to Echo Spring , 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' 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.

• Unabridged Audiobook
• Categories: Biographies & Memoirs

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What listeners say about The Trip to Echo Spring

• 4.5 out of 5 stars 4.4 out of 5.0
• 4.5 out of 5 stars 4.5 out of 5.0

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Audible.com reviews, amazon reviews.

• Overall 4 out of 5 stars
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars
• Story 4 out of 5 stars

• Pamela Abbey

Great Narration!!!!!! Great story about 20 Century make writer who suffer with alcoholism. If you like this topic and want more

If you love Williams, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, writers etc. and want to gain more insight into them and their struggles. Her voice is soothing, with a peaceful English accent, reading with great interest. WHY DO SO MANY AUDIO BOOKS have NARRATORS , that 100 PERCENT COMPLETELY DESTROY MAGNIFICENT LITERATURE, so much so you cannot listen for more than a minute or LESS?!!!!!!!! I do not understand this!!!!! Is it done on purpose? It certainly seems so. About 10 percent have excellent narrative skills. I wonder if anyone else feels this way?

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5 people found this helpful

• Overall 5 out of 5 stars
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars
• Story 5 out of 5 stars

• catherine barbosa

You will learn a lot

Of all the authors and their lives. Their experiences with alcohol and how everything around them is affected. The only thing is the book, due to the subject, is not the most off uplifting of the books. I am not sure if it is because I am the daughter of an alcoholic, and the memories sound familiar, but it is pretty sad. In another aspect, she had fantastic research, and she is an avid reader; her knowledge and impressions are well described You feel like you are with the author on the train and in a continuous hope for someone to become sober, knowing that the majority never be.

Majestic toure de force

Compelling and vivid look at writers and their drinking paired with a road trip through America seen through English eyes. The author’s familiarity and love of the writers’ work allows her to weave together the story of the different men and we hear plenty in their own matchless voices. The author also has confidence in her own excellent voice and style and the wisdom to call out the famous writers on their own deluded bullsh** There is a major flaw with the book, though it doesn’t take away from the joy of reading it. The author is unable to identify and celebrate the joys of alcohol (we learn why). Not even in a glancing mention. The immortal ecstasy of drinking with friends in your youth or the unguarded kinship of drinking with old friends in middle age is never acknowledged. Alcohol is only negative, only evil and only a first step toward life-destroying alcoholism. Shame since it would have been immensely enjoyable to read the author describing the feelings of being young and drunk and in love with life that surely these writers experienced along with the rest of us. There has to be a reason human society has grown so closely with alcohol and it can’t all be negative and soul-destroying. Immensely enjoyable listen. Highly recommend.

I was so impressed with the truth and writing and found myself watching Cat on A Hot Tin Roof

Great listen

I downloaded this on a whim and was blown away by the thoughtful insight into these great writers and their struggles with addiction. Loved every minute!

Writers and their demons

I was so happy just stumble on this book. No I have never been much of a fan of Tennessee Williams I was fascinated by all the other stories of my favorite authors. if you are an English major or just someone with a Layman's knowledge of the classics I think this book should be read.

Great listen!

This was a great listen!! I much enjoyed traveling with the author, hearing her story, and learning about the struggles of some incredible authors. I appreciate that Laing didn't glamorize the union of writing and alcoholism, but instead presented each life experience (including her own) as a confluence of writing and drinking that simultaneously formed the writers and informed their writing. Alcoholism is devastating on many levels, and Laing handles every stratum with perfect prose. Well done!!

• Story 3 out of 5 stars

• Hawaiian 54

Writers drink,AA saves

The plummy articulation of the reader gives distance. The author hints at the destructive/painful role of alcoholism in her early years, and describes the alcohol she is enjoying as her pilgrimage unrolls. The story is uneven, a wealth of detail, but not much substance. There are the friendships and later competition between writers. She mostly describes the stunning lack of awareness most of these writers had of the profound role alcoholism played in their lives. It ends sounding more like a self help book than a « compare and contrast » the role of alcohol in these writer’s lives.

2 people found this helpful

Writers as Drunks

Despite the widespread mythologizing of alcohol as some kind of fuel for the creative energies of many artists, alcohol as Laing superbly evokes with her portrait of six great American writers, was far more of a destructive factor than anything remotely positive. These great authors (Cheever, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Berryman, Carver) all famously struggled with a host of demons--alcohol though being the common one. But there's nothing glamorous or romantic about their struggle; alcohol just reduced them physically, morally, emotionally, and even creatively. To those who jibe that they wouldn't have been great artists without their demons I would counter that perhaps they could have reached greater heights as artists but more--is the price of great art worth the ruination? I am glad that we still have these great works of literature. They do make the journey toward oblivion more bearable after all. I am just sad to learn about the toll that alcohol took from these men. And that this story was limited to six white men is one of my only gripes. Those these six were giants, I think that broadening the study by looking at a more diverse sample could have only enriched what is already an interesting if depressing study. Lastly, I love Kate Reading's reading of this book. Her voice is elegant and soothing. I'm not sure what some readers who have bashed her reading of this book heard unless they just had a bad download or are listening to it at too fast or too slow a speed (I listened to it at 1.25 speed and it was perfect).

• David Perdew

Why do great writers drink?

I always wondered why great writers had to be drunks too. This book (by a self-proclaimed alcoholic) is a deep look at a few of our greatest writers and their relationship to alcohol. Seems like a weird topic, but the insights into John Cheever, Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and a couple of others is really fascinating. The other weaves the bios of these writers with visits to their writing locations as she travels the U.S. Beautiful writing and excellent premise if you’re interested in writers.

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The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking Paperback – 15 May 2014

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• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Canongate Books
• Publication date 15 May 2014
• Dimensions 12.9 x 2.1 x 19.8 cm
• ISBN-10 1847677959
• ISBN-13 978-1847677952
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About the author.

Olivia Laing is the author of four acclaimed works of non-fiction, To the River (2011), The Trip to Echo Spring (2013), The Lonely City (2016) and Everybody (2021). Her first novel, Crudo , was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and won the 2019 James Tait Memorial Prize. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2018 was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. Her work has been translated into 19 languages. Laing writes on art and culture for many publications, including the Guardian , Financial Times and New York Times . Her collected writing on art, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency , was published in 2020. She lives in Suffolk. Instagram: @olivialanguage | olivialaing.com

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Canongate Books; Main edition (15 May 2014)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1847677959
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1847677952
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.9 x 2.1 x 19.8 cm
• 12,853 in Biographies on Novelist & Playwrights

About the author

Olivia laing.

Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. She's the author of seven books, including To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring, The Lonely City and Everybody. Her work has been translated into twenty-one languages. Her first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times bestseller and won the James Tait Black Prize. Laing writes on art and culture for the Guardian, Times Literary Supplement and New York Times, among many other publications. Her collected writing on art, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, was published in 2021. The recipient of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize in nonfiction, she lives in Suffolk, England. Her next book, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise, will be published in 2024.

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Customers find the writing style engaging and rich on reflection. They also describe the content as fascinating, cool, and observant. Readers also mention the book as a best read and empathic.

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Customers find the book fascinating, intelligent, and excellent. They also say it's an engaging story of some giants from the world of American.

"...a journey around the States, Laing is the best travelling companion, observant , clever and cool...." Read more

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"This is an excellent work of biography , literary criticism, travel and psychology, and it's required reading for writers and alcoholics...." Read more

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Customers find the writing style engaging, reflective, and thoughtful. They say the author beautifully combines medical descriptions, biographical material, and journalistic material.

"...An important work of scholarship, which is immensely readable and compassionate.Laing is a magician..." Read more

"...Laing is an excellent, thoughtful, reflective writer , but whilst I was utterly enamoured by an earlier book of hers, a story of another journey, one..." Read more

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"This is an excellent work of biography, literary criticism , travel and psychology, and it's required reading for writers and alcoholics...." Read more

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Customers find the book beautifully written and empathic.

"...An important work of scholarship, which is immensely readable and compassionate .Laing is a magician..." Read more

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Book Reviews

Opening the literary liquor cabinet in 'echo spring'.

Jane Ciabattari

The Trip to Echo Spring

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Remember Brick's frequent trips to "Echo Spring" in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ? Echo Spring, Olivia Laing reminds us in her illuminating new book, is a nickname for the liquor cabinet, drawn from the brand of bourbon it contains. Symbolically, she adds, it refers to something quite different: "perhaps to the attainment of silence, or to the obliteration of troubled thoughts that comes, temporarily at least, with a sufficiency of booze."

The Trip to Echo Spring is a literary pilgrimage to the haunts of six American writers who were also prodigious drinkers: John Berryman, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Tennessee Williams. Laing analyzes their life and work anew, with their alcoholism as a throughline, using her distinctive hybrid mix of literary criticism, biography, memoir and atmospheric travel writing. (Her poetic first book, To the River , followed the Ouse, the river in which Virginia Woolf drowned herself, from headwaters to sea.)

Laing starts her journey at the Hotel Elysee in New York's theater district, where Tennessee Williams choked to death in February 1983. She winds up at Raymond Carver's grave at Ocean View Cemetery in Port Angeles, Wash.

She visits New Orleans, where Tennessee Williams felt most at home (she stops at the Carousel Bar he frequented in the Hotel Monteleone for a lime daquiri).

In Key West she visits the Hemingway house museum with its six-toed cats, and swims in the rough waters near where the alcoholic poet Hart Crane drowned in 1932, musing on Tennessee Williams' wish after his death to be "dropped over board, twelve hours north of Havana, so that my bones may rest not too far from those of Hart Crane." Williams passed this image along, she points out, to Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire and Maxine in The Night of the Iguana .

Olivia Laing's previous book, To the River , follows the course of the River Ouse, in which Virginia Woolf drowned herself. Jonathan Ring hide caption

Laing travels mostly by train (including a six-day trip from New Orleans to Seattle via Chicago), which allows her to exercise her extraordinary responsiveness to changing landscapes. She includes everything that crosses her restless and original mind, musing on the writers' memoirs, diaries, Paris Review interviews, medical records and rehabilitation efforts, and how key symptoms of alcoholism — blackouts, denial, grandiosity, aphasia — filtered into their work.

As an added pleasure, Laing is a superb literary critic. She brings fresh excitement to the arc of Williams' plays, to the pre- and post-recovery work of Cheever and Carver, to Hemingway's and Fitzgerald's stories and novels (and their notorious rivalry).

She writes at length about Berryman's Dream Songs , and his last attempt at rehab, the basis for his novel Recovery , left unfinished when he jumped from Minneapolis' Washington Avenue Bridge. In her extensive analysis of Cheever's "The Swimmer," she suggests that his alcoholic blackouts might have inspired the story's extraordinary surreal transitions. "It's these dead zones of memory that convey more powerfully than anything the depths of Neddy Merrill's ruination," she writes.

She traces the occasional intersections (a young Carver and an ailing Cheever driving to an Iowa City liquor store at 9 a.m. to buy a half-gallon of scotch). Most importantly, she pinpoints the highs and lows of the creative process, the childhood wounds that set artistic themes, and the destructive effects of long-term heavy drinking, from brain damage to "the almighty havoc alcohol wreaks on the heart," but she never loses sight of the miraculous gifts these troubled writers left behind, the art that transcended their most vulgar descents into drunken squalor.

She quotes, at one point, one of Berryman's Dream Songs:

Hunger was constitutional with him, wine, cigarettes, liquor, need need need until he went to pieces. The pieces sat up & wrote.

The Trip to Echo Spring is beautifully written, haunting, tragic and instructive in the best sense. It's a book for writers, and for readers, a book to read more than once.

clock This article was published more than  10 years ago

‘The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking’ by Olivia Laing

An earlier version of this review incorrectly described Echo Spring as a fictitious brand of bourbon. It is an actual brand. This version has been corrected.

Olivia Laing takes the title for this book about writers and booze from a scene in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," the play by Tennessee Williams. Brick, the alcoholic former football star (Ben Gazzara on Broadway in 1955, Paul Newman in the 1958 movie), is confronted by his father, Big Daddy (Burl Ives in both), and scaldingly criticized by him. Brick responds by turning his back and walking away. "Where you goin'?" Big Daddy asks, to which Brick replies, "I'm takin' a little short trip to Echo Spring."

Echo Spring is the brand of bourbon that Brick drinks, and he drinks it by the gallon. For Laing, who apparently has never met a pop-psychological argument she doesn't love, it's far more than that: "Symbolically. . . it refers to something quite different: perhaps to the attainment of silence, or to the obliteration of troubled thoughts that comes, temporarily at least, with a sufficiency of booze." Or, as Laing writes a hundred pages later: "Brick . . . has, as his wife Maggie puts it, 'fallen in love with Echo Spring'. . . . His energy is directed exclusively towards his own personal mission, which is to drink enough Echo Spring to bring on the click : the moment when all the agitating noise in his head goes blessedly to silence."

Well, there’s no question that alcohol was a big problem for a great many 20th-century writers or that Williams, Brick’s creator, knew exactly whereof he wrote. Williams, a world-class sot, is one of six men about whom Laing writes in “The Trip to Echo Spring,” the others being Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Cheever, John Berryman and Raymond Carver. As she implicitly acknowledges early on, her subjects just as easily could have been Patricia Highsmith, Truman Capote, Hart Crane, Jack London and Elizabeth Bishop. For that matter, the list could have included Ring Lardner and Frederick Exley, about whom in the distant past I wrote biographies, tasks that gave me what television announcers used to call up-close-and-personal exposure to the interaction of writing and booze, exposure that left me with the understanding that the subject does not lend itself to easy explanations.

At one level Laing seems to understand this, but at another she simply cannot resist playing a combination of quack doctor, pseudo-scientific researcher and pop psychologist. A British journalist in her mid-30s, she has chosen an American subject — fine, she’s entitled — but she completely fails to explore its American roots. She tells us (among many other things) that alcoholic writers often come from unhappy childhoods and that “the dream of letting go into water is prevalent in the work of alcoholic writers,” whatever one cares to read into that, but inasmuch as it’s commonly understood that the problem is in some ways peculiarly American, it’s both odd and irritating that she leaves this side of her subject alone.

Why she chose only male writers is a mystery: Dorothy Parker, Jean Stafford and Caroline Gordon certainly would have qualified for inclusion, to name only three, as for that matter would any number of Brits and Irish — James Joyce, Evelyn Waugh, Dylan Thomas, Kingsley Amis; indeed, the Brits are a more spectacularly alcoholic breed than we are, as Sarah Lyall is at pains to point out in her deliciously irreverent "The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British" (2008). But then the famously alcoholic American male writers of the 20th century are to all intents and purposes a cliché, so no one should be surprised that with stunning lack of imagination Laing chose to focus on them, with special and predictable emphasis on the two most famous (or notorious) of them all, Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

She doesn’t tell us anything we don’t know about them or any of her other subjects. She doesn’t really come to terms with Prohibition, though it is surely no coincidence that the rise of literary alcoholism began just as the legal spigot was turned off and the illegal one was opened wide. Rather than leading Americans away from drink, Prohibition led them toward it — especially those in literary circles. Whereas previously drinking was done in taverns, now it was done in chic, private-admission clubs and similar, if less sophisticated, watering places, where the sheer illegality of it gave drinking a cachet it never before had. It was almost as though poor Fitzgerald, the bard of the Jazz Age, felt obliged to drink to excess in order to maintain his standing as cult hero, though of course it is obvious that he was genetically predisposed to trouble with alcohol.

So was Hemingway. He held his booze better than Fitzgerald did, at least when he was young, and holding his booze was an important part of the macho Papa Hemingway fantasy that he so actively encouraged. Younger writers idolized him, so not merely did they try to imitate his prose style, they also tried to imitate what is now called his lifestyle. In the long run it has become clear that Hemingway’s influence on other writers is more important to American literature than what he wrote himself, and the life of booze is a huge part of that influence. As Laing points out, Williams worshiped Hemingway and went out of his way to sit at his master’s feet in a Key West bar.

Laing went to Key West, just as she went to other points on her subjects’ compasses; indeed, she ended up turning what started out as an exploration of alcoholism generally and literary alcoholism specifically (male American division) into a travelogue with a few drunk writers on the side. Her travels may have given her a somewhat better feel for New York, Key West, New Orleans and Port Angeles (Carver’s hangout in Washington state), but if those travels had any pertinence to her alleged larger purpose, I — stupid me — failed to make the connection.

On the other hand I ended up learning a whole lot more about Olivia Laing than I had the slightest interest in knowing. “The Trip to Echo Spring” is riddled with the first-person singular, more often than not in ways totally irrelevant to the business at hand. Thus: “Months ago, back in England, when I was just beginning to think down into the subject of alcohol, I became certain that whatever journey I was making would begin in a hotel room on East 54th Street, ten minutes’ walk from Broadway.” And: “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I am interested in absences, and the fact that the room had ceased to exist pleased me.” And: “The AA meeting was on the Upper West Side at 6 p.m. I slept a while at the hotel and then cut across Central Park, eating a hot dog on the way.”

Et cetera. That tells you nothing at all about writers and alcohol. So it cannot surprise you to learn later that, walking along the beach in Key West, Laing is pleased to be told by a passing stranger, and hastens to pass it along to us: “I hope your day is as beautiful as you are.” That is pretty much the poisonous icing on the inedible cake of this dreadful book, an exercise in narcissism and irrelevance from first page to last.

THE TRIP TO ECHO SPRING

On Writers and Drinking

By Olivia Laing

Picador. 340 pp. $26

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The Trip to Echo Spring : on Writers and Drinking

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The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking Hardcover – December 31, 2013

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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 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.

• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Picador
• Publication date December 31, 2013
• Dimensions 6 x 1 x 8.75 inches
• ISBN-10 1250039568
• ISBN-13 978-1250039569
• See all details

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“Rather than lightheartedly skipping stones along the surface of the queasily common connection between great authors and their drinking habits, Laing dives deep, plummeting into some of her subjects' darkest impulses....Impecabbly researched...exposing details that, while mostly sad, are almost sickeningly absorbing. The result is a multilayered biography that reads quick as fiction, and is teeming with fantastically melancholy details of the writers we thought we knew.” ― Lauren Viera, The Chicago Tribune

“Most beguiling and incisive.” ― The New York Times

“[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.” ― Lawrence Osborne, The New York Times Book Review

“Her exquisite readings of Hemingway's short story 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro' and Cheever's short story 'The Swimmer' will make you want to reread those anthologized chestnuts and delve into Carver's and Berryman's perhaps less familiar poetry....Laing, wisely, doesn't reach any one-size-fits-all conclusions about the bond between the pen and the bottle. Some of her writers drink, it seems, to quell panic and self-disgust; others as a stimulant; others for who-knows-what reason.” ― Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air

“[An] eccentric, impassioned, belle-lettristic, graceful and haunted book....[Laing's] story has a rambling, daydream quality.” ― The Wall Street Journal

“ The Trip to Echo Spring is a rewarding book to wend your way through even if the writers Laing focuses on Cheever, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Raymond Carver and the American poet John Berryman--aren't among your particular favorites. Laing writes a fluid, fertile nonfiction... Although Laing isn't an alcoholic herself, she alludes to several adult relationships blighted by the disease, and her second-hand understanding of it is manifestly detailed and deep...” ― Laura Miller, Salon

“Laing's writing is beautiful, her insights frequently surprising and powerful. The book's greatest virtue, however, is that it positively swells with empathy.” ― Rosie Schaap, Slate

“Olivia Laing's book is an exploration of alcoholism in six 20th-century American writers...that dazzles in both the scope of its ambition and the depths it reaches in analyzing its subjects. Laing, through the lens of extensive research both into the writer's biographies and into literature about alcoholism as a disease, paints these writers with a brush that renders them in new light....While there may be more uplifting books about writing and writers, few present the reader with such sobering realities about the downside to all those romantic, drunken nights in Paris or Key West.” ― Interview

“Olivia Laing emerges as a kind of British Susan Orlean, combining nonfiction narrative, travel writing, literary criticism and a touch of memoir in a personable style....Her descriptions of the landscape she sees, the conversations she overhears and the people she runs into are sparkling....Without building to a specific point or climax, Laing keeps you on board through her journey...” ― Newsday

“ The Trip to Echo Spring ...contains astute observations about addiction....Laing provides a remarkably cogent explanation of alcohol's effects on the brain and emotions.” ― Tampa Bay Times

“ The Trip to Echo Spring , Olivia Laing's remarkable book about six alcoholic American writers, reminds me of the overhead projections we watched in classrooms before PowerPoint came along, in which several transparent sheets were artfully lined up atop each other to produce a complex document....I've read many words about the alcoholism of literary writers, and many more words about the 12 Step model of addiction and recovery. But until "Echo Spring," I'd never read a writer who bridged both worlds with such intelligence, grace and thoughtfulness.” ― Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

“A funny, tragic, and insightful journey for anyone who has read F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, or John Berryman; prepare to be smitten with this fresh offering. Those unfamiliar with these writers will want to read their works.” ― Library Journal (starred review)

“Laing, with shimmering detail and arresting insights, presents a beautifully elucidating and moving group portrait of writers enslaved by drink and redeemed by 'the capacity of literature to somehow...make one feel less flinchingly alone.'” ― Booklist (starred review)

“The tortured relationship between literary lions and their liquor illuminates the obscure terrain of psychology and art in this searching biographical medidation....Laing's astute analysis of the pervasive presence and meaning of drink in the writers' texts, and its reflection of the writers' struggle to shape--and escape--reality...A fine study of human frailty through the eyes of its most perceptive victims” ― Publishers Weekly (starred)

“A provocative, evocative blend of memoir, literary history and lyrical travel writing.” ― Kirkus Reviews

“I'm sorry I've finished this wonderful book because I feel I've been talking to a wise friend. I've been trying to work out exactly how Olivia Laing drew me in, because I hardly drink myself and have no particular attachment to the group of writers whose trials she describes. I think the tone is beautifully modulated, knowledgeable yet intimate, and she can evoke a state of mind as gracefully as she evokes a landscape....I think this is a book for all writers or would-be writers, whether succeeding or failing, whether standing on their feet or flat on the pavement....It's one of the best books I've read about the creative uses of adversity: frightening but perversely inspiring.” ― Hilary Mantel, Booker Prize–winning author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies

“I loved The Trip to Echo Spring . It's a beautiful book that has stayed with me in a profound way.” ― Nick Cave

“ The Trip to Echo Spring ...thank God, never reductively answers the question [why writers drink] but thoughtfully explores it through an examination of the lives and careers of 'Tennessee Williams, John Cheever and Raymond Carver among others.” ― Jay McInerney

“A beguiling, beautifully written journey in search of six famous literary drunks. What gives her book its brilliance and originality...[is] the quality of its writing.” ― The Sunday Times (London)

“The beauty of Laing's book lies not just in the poetry of her prose, the rich array of images, and literary allusions to her chosen subjects evoked during her transcontinental ghost-hunt, but intriguing links she makes to a wider literary landscape.” ― The Independent (London)

“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.” ― The Times (London)

“This book is 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.” ― Scotland on Sunday

“Like a night out with an academically-inclined Elizabeth Taylor or Ava Gardner. Sodden, surprising, riotous, and crazily up and down. Welsh puritan that I am, I loved it.” ― Daily Mail

“The book's subtitle, Why Writers Drink, undersells her achievement. …[Laing has produced] a nuanced portrait--via biography, memoir, analysis--of the urge of the hyperarticulate to get raving drunk.” ― New Statesman (London)

“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.” ― List (London)

“Matches smart textual analysis of 20th-century greats with down-and-dirty ferreting....A superb idea, exceptionally well executed.” ― Metro (London)

About the Author

Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Picador; First Edition (December 31, 2013)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1250039568
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1250039569
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1 x 8.75 inches
• #447 in Popular Psychology Creativity & Genius
• #1,236 in Substance Abuse Recovery
• #2,598 in Author Biographies

About the author

Olivia laing.

Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. She's the author of seven books, including To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring, The Lonely City and Everybody. Her work has been translated into twenty-one languages. Her first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times bestseller and won the James Tait Black Prize. Laing writes on art and culture for the Guardian, Times Literary Supplement and New York Times, among many other publications. Her collected writing on art, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, was published in 2021. The recipient of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize in nonfiction, she lives in Suffolk, England. Her next book, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise, will be published in 2024.

Customer reviews

• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 48% 29% 14% 5% 3% 48%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 48% 29% 14% 5% 3% 29%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 48% 29% 14% 5% 3% 14%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 48% 29% 14% 5% 3% 5%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 48% 29% 14% 5% 3% 3%

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

Customers say

Customers find the content insightful and outstanding. They also praise the writing style as excellent and thoroughly researched. However, some find the plot lengthy, poorly informed, and annoying. Opinions are mixed on the humor, with some finding it sad, evocative, and funny, while others say it's devoid of wit, sarcasm, humor, insight, and argument.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the book insightful, remarkable, and thorough. They also say it's descriptive, evocative, and offers empathy and reality throughout. Readers also say the style and pace capture the mystery and tragedy of addiction adeptly and beautifully.

"...And that, in the end, is this book’s beautiful and lasting message : contrary to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous assertion, there are second acts, even..." Read more

"...she makes a good case for her choices and while demonstrating deep understanding of their work , also exhibits a degree of honesty about their..." Read more

"...Her work and research are thorough with respect to the lives and writings of John Cheever, Tennessee Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway..." Read more

"...their alcoholic episodes are well documented and provide a rich source for a deeper understanding of the alcaholic desease, as well as amusing and..." Read more

Customers find the writing style excellent, gripping, and thought-provoking. They also say the book explores dark places in the lives of some of America's writers.

"...I digress. Laing’s excellently written and thoroughly researched book performs a valuable public service here, not by pointing out the myriad..." Read more

"...I strongly recommend THE TRIP TO ECHO SPRING as a masterful piece of writing that provides the reader with an seemingly endless amount of insight..." Read more

"...She writes in a nice and easy to read prose ...." Read more

"...The author's discipline is remarkable , she maintains the impossible balance of objectivity, criticism, empathy and reality throughout the book and..." Read more

Customers appreciate the overall quality of the book. They also say it's a beautiful work.

"The men involved were artistic , literate,and wildly misunderstoodThere is a similar thread that follows all of them...." Read more

"...writers and skip this book, although the cover is cool and looks good in my bookcase ." Read more

" Beautiful work , thanks!..." Read more

" Elegant , interesting, and a bit alarming..." Read more

Customers are mixed about the humor in the book. Some find it sad, evocative, and funny, while others say it's devoid of wit, sarcasm, humor, insight, and argument.

"...understanding of the alcaholic desease, as well as amusing and sometimes shocking anecdotes ...." Read more

"...drinking owing to alcoholic parents or whatever--this tome is devoid of wit , sarcasm, humor, insight, argument, really any of the cleverness or..." Read more

"... Mine is humorous , hers is factual. Both are filled with opinions." Read more

"Really enjoyable read...sad, evocative and funny ...." Read more

Customers find the plot in the book broken up by lengthy narratives about the author's own life. They also say the book feels unfocused and jumbled at times. Readers also say that the author draws speculative conclusions from her own questionable life.

"...It just feels at times like an unfocused jumble , and the author might have been better served selecting one mission and sticking to it...." Read more

"...somehow, somewhere in the middle the author lost me. I was not interested in the narrative of her various trips and her observations...." Read more

"...writers and their addictions but the book itself is broken up by lengthy narratives by the author about her own life and her various travels while..." Read more

"This book loses its focus and wanders among its stories like a drunk in a crowded bar. Couldn't finish it so I can't say more." Read more

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