The Trip to Echo Spring

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What to expect

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.

Critics Review

  • “Most beguiling and incisive.”

    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.”

    New York Times Book Review

  • “Exquisite…Laing, wisely, doesn’t reach any one-size-fits-all conclusions about the bond between the pen and the bottle…A marvelous writer.”

    NPR's Fresh Air

  • “A funny, tragic, and insightful journey…prepare to be smitten with this fresh offering.”

    Library Journal (starred review)

  • “Intently observant, curious, and empathetic, 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 meditation…The book’s heart is Laing’s astute analysis of the pervasive presence and meaning of drink in the writers’ texts, and its reflection of the writers’ struggles to shape—and escape—reality…The result is a fine study of a human frailty through the eyes of its most perceptive victims.”

    Publishers Weekly

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