The Trip to Echo Spring by Olivia Laing

The Trip to Echo Spring by Olivia Laing

WHY IS IT THAT SOME OF THE GREATEST WORKS OF LITERATURE HAVE BEN PRODUCED BY WRITERS IN THE GRIP OF ALCOHOLISM, AN ADICTION THAT COST THEM PERSONAL HAPINES 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 caf s 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 a well-known author and critic. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, Observer, New Statesman, Frieze, and the New York Times, among other media. She was the 2014 Eccles Writer in Residence at the British Library and is a Yaddo and MacDowell Fellow. To the River was nominated for the Ondaatje Award and the Dolman Travel Book of the Year by the Royal Society of Literature. The Journey to Echo Spring, her second book, was a finalist for the 2013 Costa Biography Award and the 2014 Gordon Burn Prize, and The Lonely City was a finalist for the 2016 Gordon Burn Prize. She is a Cambridge resident.