The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking

A “most beguiling and incisive” account of how writers in the grip of alcoholism created some of American literature’s greatest works (New York Times).

A New York Times Notable Book of 2014

A Time Magazine Notable Book of 2014

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.

“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)

“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

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