Blog
Olivia Laing on Writers and Drinking
by Dan
Biography & Memoir / December 17, 2013
In her forthcoming book The Trip to Echo Spring (published later this month by Picador), Olivia Laing examines the link between writing and drinking through the lives of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver.
All six of these writers were alcoholics and not only did they drink together, the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work.
Having grown up in an alcoholic family herself, Laing travelled from Cheever's New York to Williams's New Orleans, and from Hemingway's Key West to Carver's Port Angeles, trying to make sense of this ferocious, entangling disease, and to unravel the high price of creativity: