Saturday, December 28, 2013

Book Review Podcast: Writers and the Bottle

(from The New York Times)

In The New York Times Book Review, Lawrence Osborne reviews Olivia Laing’s “The Trip to Echo Spring,” which chronicles the alcoholism of six American writers: John Cheever, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Carver. Mr. Osborne writes:

Laing’s six writers are not dissimilar. They suffer decline, dementia and paranoia at the hands of various combinations of vodka, Scotch, beer, gin and wine. But why did they drink at all? “Echo Spring” is the term Brick uses in Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” to describe booze to his father, Big Daddy. “I’m takin’ a little short trip to Echo Spring,” he says, and we all know he’s referring to a brand of bourbon stashed in the liquor cabinet. A secret, a compulsion, a private tragedy, and then again both a release and an ecstasy — alcohol is a catalyst for something difficult to categorize. “I was beginning to think,” Laing writes, “that drinking might be a way of disappearing from the world.” It’s a beautiful sentence and it hints at the torment she is trying to locate.

On this week’s podcast, Ms. Laing discusses her book and John Williams talks about Morrissey’s “Autobiography.” Pamela Paul is the host.

click here to listen to podcast.


*Bloggers note: This is I believe the same Lawrence Osborne that wrote "The Wet and The Dry" - a book I just read and reviewed. So I think this is an interesting topic and the podcast will be good. I am going to take a listen now.

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