Three very warm reviews of Olivia Laing’s The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink.
Olivia Laing’s . . . book takes its title from a line in Tennessee Williams’s play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It’s an apt phrase for a book about writers and alcoholism, with its combined dose of the sublime and the helplessly mortal. But “Echo Spring” is only the liquor cabinet, named after a brand of whiskey.
The alcoholic writer’s sense of mortality is key. F Scott Fitzgerald, an insomniac, had an annihilating vision before sleep; he imagined he was only one of the dark millions riding forward in black buses toward the unknown.
I neither want it [brandy] nor need it, but I should think it pretty hazardous to interfere with the ineradicable habit of a lifetime.
Churchill.
manwithoutqualities 