The Trip to Echo Spring by Olivia Laing

The Trip to Echo Spring Reviews

• 
  Diane

  This book combines two of my favorite topics -- alcoholism and writers. And yet, I was disappointed.
  
  Olivia Laing picked six writers who struggled with alcohol addiction: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, John Berryman, and Raymond Carver. Laing traveled around the United States to visit their old haunts, analyzed their writings about drinking, and mixed it all up with some scientific research into alcoholism.
  
  "I wanted to know what made a person drink and what it did to them. More specifically I wanted to know why writers drink, and what effect this stew of spirits has had upon the body of literature itself ... There have been many books and articles that revel in describing exactly how grotesque and shameful the behaviour of alcoholic writers can be. That wasn't my intention. What I wanted was to discover how each of these men ... experienced and thought about their addiction."
  
  What I found most interesting were the drinking stories and quotes she included from the writers themselves or from those who knew them. However, there are only eight chapters in the book, and instead of focusing on one writer in a chapter, she jumped between the six men so often that I found it jarring. For example, just when I would be getting in the groove about Cheever, she'd suddenly switch to a Fitzgerald anecdote.
  
  I think my favorite section discussed the friendship/rivalry between Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and how Hemingway would look down on Scott for not being able to hold his drink. Hem wrote: "Alcohol was a straight poison to Scott instead of a food." Of course, we know that alcohol is a poison, but Hem didn't see it that way.
  
  There was also a strong section on Tennessee Williams and his time in New Orleans. Laing, who is British, said she "found it almost impossible to piece New Orleans together. It wasn't like any place I'd ever visited, though at times it reminded me in its rich confusion of Addis Ababa, especially at night."
  
  Aside from the New Orleans section, the travelogue portions were the weakest part of the book. Laing took an Amtrak train for much of her journey across the States, and she included far too many pointless observations and random conversations with strangers that had no bearing on the narrative.
  
  It seems like Laing was trying to mix three different types of writing: scientific research into alcoholism, a travelogue around the U.S., and a critical analysis of literature and letters, but the final concoction was flat.
  
  Note: The title refers to a line in Tennessee Williams' play "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," when Brick, the alcoholic husband, says he's "takin' a little short trip to Echo Spring," which was a nickname for a liquor cabinet that housed a brand of bourbon.
• 
  Jennifer Welsh

  3.5
  
  I’m always on the lookout for a good audiobook, for when my eyes are tired, or when doing chores. This is free with audible membership, and the narrator is clear and crisp, like the text she reads. Laing is an excellent writer - I enjoyed her language, her psychological observations and thorough research, her touch of the personal. I think this would make a great docuseries, with each episode focused on a specific writer explored in the book: John Cheever, Raymond Carver, Tennessee Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and John Berryman. In that format, the wide range of focus - the personal life of each writer, his dance with alcohol, and his intersecting friendship with another on this list; the close look at the literary works of these writers through Laing’s analytical mind; some of the brain science behind alcoholism, along with some of its history; a touch of how alcoholism impacted Laing and her family; and the literal journey Laing took through some of the relevant United States, such as New Orleans and Key West. It’s got the right amount of depth and breadth for a docuseries to satisfy.
  
  As a book, however, I was hoping for a deeper dive. I was especially disappointed by her self-exploration, which felt little more than a dip of her big toe, although some of those dips were deeply moving.
  
  I also found that my level of engagement depended greatly on my knowledge of the writer explored. As someone who’s been riveted by case studies of complete strangers because of human recognition, I can only guess that the analysis here of literary works requires some foreknowledge for full appreciation. That said, I was fully absorbed in the biographies of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and especially Tennessee, who has been a favorite playwright of mine since college; I found the one about Carver interesting, as I’ve read a story or two; I grasped a bit at Cheever, enjoying some of his human exposure and connections with these other writers, but was also thrilled that my friend, Bonnie, just handed me a tome of his work; and Berryman eluded me. I also found that Laing’s travels were more engrossing in New Orleans, where I’ve been. I wasn’t absorbed in her other locations, but felt grounded, at least, in familiar New York. I don’t need to be familiar with a place to enjoy a book set there - in fact, I read to immerse myself in unfamiliar worlds - so I’m not sure why I felt that way here, but I did. I’m not going to recommend a trip to each place before reading this, but I do recommend exposure to each writer. I also wonder if reading the physical book would’ve been more fulfilling, as I did have moments I wanted to return to, lines I wanted to chew and digest.
• 
  julieta

  I have said this many times, but I love the way Olivia Laing thinks, how she connects themes in her head, and finds ways to make these connections great storytelling. The only part I did not love was when she spoke of John Berryman, I just thought it was the truly tragic part, maybe because I had not read that writer in particular. I was not after dark stories, even if this is a book about alcoholics, I was more curious to know where she would take it, since I have read other books by her and I like the way her mind works. Here I felt she was looking for something else, something on vulnerability, on being human, on trauma, and I like to think there is more to say than just a story about how sometimes you are won over by your weakness, or by your pain. Maybe we don´t tend to look at other peoples pain very much, and maybe there is no way out sometimes, but I do feel that art is an expression that we leave behind after we are gone, even when life has been too much. And this book maybe gives us a picture on how tough it can be, even for people who have marked the literary world in such a beautiful way.
• 
  Washington Post

  “The Trip to Echo Spring” uncovers very little new about authors we know too much about. Instead of Hemingway or Fitzgerald, she might have inspected the lives of Kingsley Amis or Dorothy Parker. This book is riddled with the first-person singular, more often than not in ways totally irrelevant to the business at hand. Thus: “Months ago, back in England, when I was just beginning to think down into the subject of alcohol, I became certain that whatever journey I was making would begin in a hotel room on East 54th Street, ten minutes’ walk from Broadway.” And: “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I am interested in absences, and the fact that the room had ceased to exist pleased me.” And: “The AA meeting was on the Upper West Side at 6 p.m. I slept a while at the hotel and then cut across Central Park, eating a hot dog on the way.”
  
  Et cetera. That tells you nothing at all about writers and alcohol. So it cannot surprise you to learn later that, walking along the beach in Key West, Laing is pleased to be told by a passing stranger, and hastens to pass it along to us: “I hope your day is as beautiful as you are.” That is pretty much the poisonous icing on the inedible cake of this dreadful book, an exercise in narcissism and irrelevance from first page to last.
  
  Jonathan Yardley reviewed the book for us:
  http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinion...
• 
  Sian Lile-Pastore

  well, just thinking about alcoholism fills me with anxiety, but this is a wonderful book and just my kind of thing. while it is in the main about why writers drink, it is also a little bit of a travel book and a memoir and is just lovely and bookish and tender and slightly sad.
  
  it focuses on the lives of berryman, fitzgerald, hemingway, tenessee williams, raymond carver and john cheever (and if you are concerned that Laing is ignoring women writers/drinkers, she addresses that quite early on in the book)and has some really fascinating insights - one of which that really stuck with me was the fact that lots of the alcoholic writers are also obsessed with water and it's cleansing properties... like cheevers 'the swimmer', the pools in fitzgerald, carver's fishing and lots more...
  
  I could have done with more about Carver... or just more in general, am really interested in reading her previous book now too.
• 
  Nada Elshabrawy

  أوليفيا لاينج هي واحدة من قلائل ـ في رأيي المتواضع ـ بين الكتاب والكاتبات المعاصرين اللي ممكن يتقال عليها مفكرة حقيقية. تذكرني دائمًا بسونتاج مع وجود فروق كبيرة بينهم.
  كتاباتها بتحمل عمق واختلاف، وموضوعاتها مثيرة جدًا وغير مطروحة معظم الوقت او على الأقل لا يتم التعاطي معها خارج الاوساط الاكاديمية.
  المدينة الوحيدة كتابها الوحيد المترجم للعربية، ولكن باقي كتاباتها لا تقل عنه، بل تزيد، في الاهمية.
  كالعادة، بعد كل كتاب لها، أعد قائمة قراءات حدثتني عنها أو ناقشتها في الكتاب. وهذا لو تعلمون عظيم.
  
  
• 
  Roger

  That there is something fascinating to many about the connexion between alcohol and writing is evidenced by the bibliography of the book under review, which contains a healthy selection of articles and books discussing the issue from all sorts of angles. One of the books in the bibliography, The Thirsty Muse : alcohol and the American writer, is a book I've read several times: I was hoping that The trip to Echo Spring would be another enjoyable essay into this murky subject, but alas I closed the book feeling disappointed.
  
  Initially this book was full of promise - Laing writes near the beginning "There have been many books and articles that revel in describing exactly how grotesque and shameful the behaviour of alcoholic writers can be. That wasn't my intention. What I wanted was to discover how each of these men [Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, John Berryman and Raymond Carver] - and, along the way, some of the many others who'd suffered from the disease [alcoholism] - experienced and thought about their addiction." Laing was hoping to come closer to finding the reason why such talented individuals drank so dangerously. Along the way there would be short diversions into medicine and psychology to help Laing and the reader along the path to understanding.
  
  Unfortunately for the book these are not the only diversions. This book is, disappointingly, what I call "new" non-fiction, by which I mean non-fiction where the author's activity takes up a healthy share of the pages. This is a most annoying circumstance of our current literary age: whether it is an indication of the rise of a "me" generation, or whether it is felt that by doing so personalises and makes a book easier to read I don't know, but, apart from a very few works of genius it is a mode that usually fails, as it does here. As the book moves on the authorial intrusion becomes more, well, intrusive. Apart from a few passages where Laing describes why she became interested in the subject (her experiences with alcoholic family members / partners) and some descriptive material about places she visits that are to do with the authors, all of the writing about herself (mostly to do with the train journey she takes across the USA to visit the authorial sites) is really superfluous to the subject of the book, and is at times frankly strange. Snippets of conversation, descriptions of views from train windows, discussions with fellow passengers which have nothing to do with writing or alcohol just struck me as out of place in this book. It's a very brave or foolish author who sets their descriptive writing alongside quotations from the likes of Fitzgerald and Hemingway as Laing does in this book. The comparison is not favourable.
  
  However, it's not all bad news - Laing does find some interesting connexions between the writers discussed, and does delve into their literature, letters, memoirs &c to find where they've either tried or failed to come to grips with their problems. Inevitably she has to, from time-to-time, discuss their shameful behaviour, but on the whole she stays true to her desire not to make that the main focus. Her writing on the families of the writers studied is interesting and I think does shine some light into the problems they had. As a person who doesn't read many biographies of writers, I was unaware that both Hemingway's and Berryman's fathers committed suicide - which had lasting effects on each of them.
  
  In the end there is no definitive answer as to why writers and drink sometimes form such a toxic combination, although if there's any connecting link between these six it might be that they drank to hide their insecurities, from others and from themselves.
  
  I will, after reading this, go and read some Cheever, and re-visit Carver and Berryman, who I haven't looked at for a long time. Laing has given me a new way to look at them.
  
  If Laing had not decided to make this book a vehicle for herself as much as her subject she might have produced a very good short book. As it is, she has produced an average three hundred page book. A shame.
  
  Check out my other reviews at
  http://aviewoverthebell.blogspot.com.au/
• 
  Joanne

  This book was disappointing. I heard the author being interviewed on the radio, and she intrigued me. However, I found the book to be just plain tedious. I don't need to read excerpts from the DSM or have explained to me how alcohol works. I wanted to read more about these gifted men and less about the author wandering around Key West or New Orleans. The book bored me, and I found myself skimming great swatches of chapters. Can't recommend this book if you are looking for details of the writers.
• 
  Kusaimamekirai

  This is a profoundly moving book about six writers: Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Cheever. All six men struggled with alcohol abuse for most of their lives, with it ultimately in one form or another, killing each of them.
  Part travelogue (the author who is English travels across America in search of the spaces these writers inhabited) and part biography,this book provides brief sketches of their lives, their disintegration, and how alcohol became an inescapable part of their lives and art.
  While all the stories share common themes such as abusive households, absent fathers who often met violent ends, or unstable relationships with women, what struck me the most was the despair they all shared.
  There is for example a clip on YouTube of Tennessee Williams fresh out of rehab appearing on the David Frost show. He claims to be sober and yet is clearly inebriated. He smiles the nervous smile of a man who clearly knows that what he is saying is a lie and yet the audience laughs nervously with him. It is incredibly sad to watch and it provides a window into the life of a man who you know is dying in front of you and yet, nobody can or is willing to, stop him.
  Yet it would be a mistake to simply write these men off as self indulgent drunks who lacked self control.
  Take again the case of Williams when after being savagely beaten by some random youths on his way home was asked about the incident:
  
  “They knew who he was, but he didn’t let it bother him. ‘Why not?’ an interviewer asked a few months later, and he replied, stalwart as ever: ‘Because, baby, I don’t allow it to.’ "
  
  I don’t allow it to.
  I’m not sure why this response stuck with me like it did but it’s quite amazing. In a world of drugs, alcohol, and personal chaos, Williams still managed to maintain his dignity and decency where he could. It seemed to me to be the heart of this book. That a man may be falling apart, he may have little left in his life that he can control, but he can always control how he responds to the blows the world may throw at him. The men chronicled here did not for the most part deal with those blows well. However, all of them maintained a kind of courage to continue chronicling their struggle through their art. They left behind a valuable lesson for anyone struggling with depression and all in their own way lived incredible lives. The sadness lies in the fact that their demons cut short what could have been so much more. A truly amazing but very sad read.
• 
  Puck

  “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you."
  - F. Scott Fitzgerald
  
  In
  The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing set out to debunk the myth of “alcohol + creativity = success”. By researching the addictions of six famous authors, the author shows not only how alcohol left a mark on their work, but also on their health.
  
  Laing’s engaging prose easily takes us along her journey through America while she studies the works of Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, John Berryman, Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver.
  Despite their differences, at their core all these men struggled with similar problems: an alcoholic father, a restricting mother, mental health issues, repressed homosexual feelings…Neither did it help that in the 20th century alcohol addiction wasn’t taken seriously. Look at the Great Gatsby: no one wants the party to stop.
  
  “Modern life is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.”
  - Ernest Hemingway
  
  I’m not familiar with any of the studied authors – I’ve heard of their work, but that’s it – so I enjoyed learning about their lives and how the men inspired each other. However, instead of focusing on one author per chapter, Laing mixes up their stories, often confusing me about whom I was following.
  I also would’ve preferred if Laing had cut down on her travel-descriptions. They added little to the narrative and to the underlying message of this book. Alcohol doesn’t help you a better author (shocker): it helps you to die quicker.
  
  So although this book is a moodkiller – reading how lonely, nervous men ruin their health isn't fun - this 'mood-killing' is also this book’s strength. Alcohol is a toxic, a dangerous addiction, and to show its destructive effects still is important today.
  Well done Laing, but less traveloque stories next time. 3 stars
• 
  George Ilsley

  Been handling this book for a while and finally read it. It is strangely powerful at times, an exploration of the drinking habits of certain famous writers (famous for their work and famous for their drinking).
  
  The connection between alcohol and creativity is controversial, and I was unable to figure out how Laing managed to achieve the synergy from her topic and her approach to the topic through this book. It is astonishing how much people used to drink; on the other hand some of these heavy drinkers, such as
  F. Scott Fitzgerald, were dead at age 44.
  
  In a recent news article on drinking culture, it was suggested that if alcohol were invented today it would never be approved for human consumption because of its toxic nature and side-effects (it is a carcinogen, a fact rarely mentioned in polite society). Alcohol is still the drug of choice for many people, and the unquestioned acceptance of this environment while seemingly being oblivious to it, being blind to the nature of a pervasive addiction throughout society, is not really addressed in this book. Of course, that aspect was not Laing's treatise: she was concerned with the intersection of writing and drinking and used six well-known writers as the means to explore the topic. And explore it she does.
  
  Does alcohol foster creativity or destroy it? If you end up dead at 44 you better work fast!
• 
  John

  A confession: I wasn't interested in the work of all but one of the writers profiled (Tennessee Williams). However, I got the book from the library primarily for the travel narrative aspect, where I felt Laing excelled. The writers' biographies interested me (for the most part), as did the author's own story, which I didn't find intrusive at all. I did tend to zone out when she examined their actual work in any detail, but as I said, I knew that might happen at the outset.
  
  This book is recommended for those who are fans of some of the writers profiled, as there isn't really enough travel narrative to include it solidly in that genre. Still, I found it a good introduction to Laing's high writing quality, making me look forward to read her other books.
• 
  Agnes

  Interessante , soprattutto per me che sono nel periodo " scrittori nord-americani-recenti" ( Cheever, Carver, Yates, Ford etc) .
  In questo libro l'autrice racconta - con uno stile molto scorrevole e con frequenti citazioni delle loro opere - di Hemingway, T. Williams. Cheever, Carver e dei loro problemi con la dipendenza da alcool . Olivia Laing sa di cosa sta parlando e lo fa molto bene .
• 
  Vartika

  3.5 Stars
  
  There is something rather incredible about the way Olivia Laing writes, including what she chooses to write about, and how. This, rather than my own non-interest in alcohol and white male literary figures (or my largely latent interest in writing) is what made me pick up this book.
  
  In The Trip To Echo Spring Laing pursues the connection between the lives and works of six extraordinary American men — F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, John Berryman, John Cheever and Raymond Carver — and looks at how these affected and were affected by their memories, relationships, childhoods, selfhood and other experiences throughout their lives. Her focus is on the journey in, out, and about the archetype of the 'alcoholic writer' whose glory in either domain is often assumed to be inseparable from the other.
  
  I have immense respect for Laing's immersive methodology for studying these men, taking a journey across America to experience and understand the contexts and remains of their lives. Her own trip, thus, becomes an important part of the narrative of this book, which unfolds as a very personal and devoted exploration of these men and their alcoholism, of the American literary landscape, and of the author's own experience of growing up in the company of a parental figure who preferred a drink too many. The Trip to Echo Spring is, therefore, more than just a literary biography of alcoholism or alcoholic writers — it is also a memoir through which Laing brings to herself the same release and healing she seeks to investigate in these idols.
  
  Because I dived into this book without no prior knowledge of the works of all concerned authors but Fitzgerald and Williams, I particularly connected with what was said and unearthed about their lives. While Laing does not expressly bring out revelations about these writers, she succeeds in humanising them in a manner beyond mere literary criticism or biography. She also tears apart the glamourous notion of the 'creative high,' looking at what really drove these men to drink, and to write.
  
  Over all, I found The Trip to Echo Spring a worthwhile read — gripping, emotional, and somehow still light. While Laing's The Lonely City has my heart, the rawness of this one deserves nothing less than high regard.
• 
  Sean Barrs

  Goodreads winner!
  
  This book provides insight into the drinking habits of six authors and the consequential alcoholism. It is evident that a great deal of research has gone into this as it shines through their experiences. The author has written it, for the most part, in an engaging and informative way. I enjoyed reading some parts of it.
  
  My major criticism is that the author has filled the pages with her own experiences with alcoholism along with her childhood and how the two relate. I don’t see the relevance of this. We’re supposed to read about the link between creative genius and addiction not the ability to criticise and addiction.
  
• 
  Nickolas Butler

  Olivia Laing's writing is beautiful and evocative and her exploration of alcoholism and American writing is noteworthy because of her deep sense of empathy for the authors she focuses on. It is much easier to criticize or lampoon Hemingway or Carver than it is to delve deeply into their biographies in search of exactly *WHY* they are so very flawed, and talented. Her writing about Key West, in particular, was lush, and after suffering through a historically cold Wisconsin winter, a welcome portal into a warmer, greener world.
• 
  Paul Ataua

  In a trip to Echo Spring, Laing draws together six American writers with the common theme of alcoholism and how that alcoholism made or unmade their work and life. It is good on description, has some interesting anecdotes, but is somewhat disappointing when it moves into interpretation. Mildly interesting.
• 
  Jeff Bursey

  In this somewhat light read (despite the potentially heavy topic), Olivia Laing guides us through her thoughts and impressions about alcoholics generally and six alcoholic writers in particular: Cheever, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Berryman, T. Williams, and Carver.
  
  Laing's way with imagery and her ability to tie together various threads from the writers' lives saves this book from being a series of sketches. I think her inspiration to use trains (for the most part) to get to various parts of the u.s. that these writers called home was a good idea, if perhaps not taken full advantage of. (For instance, left almost completely untouched is what the writers thought of trains themselves.) No excuses are made for the writers' behaviour or for when what they turn out is unsuccessful art. There is a biographical element to this book that Laing uses sparingly and effectively to help bridge her life with the artworks of the figures under consideration.
• 
  Anna Baillie-Karas

  A fascinating account of six writers & their battles with alcoholism, and part travel memoir as Olivia Laing visits their home towns in America. I learnt much about these writers - all fascinating characters - & the destructive side of their addictions. Interesting & sad to ponder why men of such talent kept ruining it - & what more they could have achieved. Laing is compassionate & her writing is exquisite. A great read.
• 
  Holly

  A British woman-journalist traveling around the U.S. thinking about alcoholism - though not very deeply - and trotting out the biographies of very well-known American writers - while filling the pages with her own self-indulgent descriptive writing and a superficial survey of the meaning of alcoholism (she seems to think the Twelve Steps of AA is the key to understanding everything and we get the full list at least twice and the individual steps countless times). The framework of the roadtrip to visit each writer's haunt, complete with frontispiece map, seemed unnecessary and simply another excuse for Laing to talk about herself (train travel, plane travel, etc). And despite filling the pages with herself and hints of her personal relationship to alcohol/alcoholics, this too is unsatisfying and thin: How many times did she begin a sentence with "It was hard to express ..."? She cops out of writing about women writers because "their stories came too close to home" and that's all we get of that.
  
  After the first section disappointed me I began to read back to front, jumping to the Raymond Carver section next. Unfortunately (for the author) the Port Angeles pages revealed that her landscape descriptions were romantically overwritten and her facts were fuzzy if not inaccurate (she omits to mention the inelegant truth that Tess Gallagher's Sky House is more or less in a subdivision that sits above a movie theater). The Gordon Lish name-drop glosses over a fascinating story (though it has little to do with alcoholism?). I can believe Laing got lost on the way to Carver's grave (and I'm unsurprised to learn that Gallagher actually writes responses to visitors in the grave's ledger). But I'd have learned more about Carver reading one chapter of Carol Sklenicka's biography.
  
  I think I'm becoming irritated by these recent books that are ostensibly biographies and "hard" nonfiction that end up being a hybrid of their personal "exploration" of a subject - complete with road trip - and their personal memoir (think Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks; Rachel Cohen did this more skillfully and less ostentatiously in A Chance Meeting). Are publishers asking for this? I read plenty of memoirs but I accept that "contract" between the writer and myself before I begin reading (e.g.,, I plan to read Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn and I know it's a memoir-with-physics). Mostly what I was left with, besides annoyance, was the thought that it's time to re-read Tom Dardis's excellent 1989 book on American writers and alcoholism, The Thirsty Muse.
• 
  Lucrezia

  All’epoca fui colpita dal fatto che, recandosi alla tomba di uno scrittore, tutti quegli sconosciuti anonimi e sofferenti riponessero la loro fede nei racconti, nella capacità della letteratura di sedare il senso di strazio, di farci sentire meno irrimediabilmente soli. Pensai a quando ero bambina, al fatto che iniziai a leggere perché c’erano cose della mia vita che non riuscivo a sostenere. Nel 1969, sei anni prima di diventare sobrio, la Paris Review chiese a John Cheever se davanti alla macchina da scrivere si sentisse una divinità. La sua risposta può essere vista come un delirio – la parola che Berryman cancellò dalle bozze della sua intervista. Ma forse non lo era. Forse questa va presa per buona. No, non mi sono mai sentito una divinità. No, il senso è quello di rendersi utili a una causa. Tutti abbiamo quel senso di padronanza, fa parte della nostra vita: ce l’abbiamo in amore, nel lavoro che ci piace. È una sensazione di estasi, semplice. Il senso è che «così posso rendermi utile, e posso farlo per sempre». Ti lascia dentro una sensazione meravigliosa. In poche parole, dà senso alla propria vita. Pensai a tutti loro. Pensai al Fitzgerald ragazzo, schiena dritta e pantaloni di tela bianca, che cantava Far Away in Colon Town temendo di morire dalla vergogna. Pensai al viaggio di Berryman a Tampa per il funerale di suo padre («come mi sono comportato in macchina»), a Cheever stretto in un completo di serge blu troppo piccolo, intrappolato nella «pungente solitudine della mia adolescenza». Pensai a Williams, quando ancora lo chiamavano Tom, mentre sfrecciava per le strade di St Louis cercando di calmare il suo cuore che andava a mille. Pensai a Hemingway, quando a nove anni, in una lettera rivolta al padre, la più vecchia giunta fino a noi, diceva: «Ho preso sei vongole nel fiume e del frumento alto sei piedi». Pensai a tutto quello che avevano scritto; al senso che avevano dato alle loro vite tormentate. E seduta lì nell’erba in cima alla scogliera, capii perché amavo così tanto il racconto di R e del pesce tagliato a metà. Tutti in qualche modo siamo come R. Nel senso che tutti abbiamo dentro di noi qualcosa che può essere rifiutato; che sotto la luce sembra d’argento. Certo, possiamo negarlo, o buttarlo via. Possiamo odiarlo a tal punto da ucciderci di alcol. Alla fine, però, l’unica cosa da fare è mantenere il controllo, mettere insieme i pezzi. È a quel punto che comincia il recupero. È a quel punto che la seconda vitai – quella buona – può avere inizio.
• 
  Jessica Anne

  I'm going to write a shitty review along the lines of why this book is shitty (aka, I'm going to make it personal when I should be objective).
  
  I like Olivia Laing. I like why she chose all male white American alcoholic authors ("because I liked them"), and I like how she writes about landing on airport runways with slowly pulsating lights in the night. Her sentences often take off in a very beautiful way.
  
  But.
  
  I wanted to read about writers and alcoholism, not about her planes and trains across America. I wanted answers about why authors are alcoholics, and what it means for their work...or at least speculations. Instead, I found a long-winded personal narrative. Really, the story's just a travel log with a lot of dismal facts about miserable people thrown in.
  
  It's only in the author interview, on page 342, that she explains the book's real purpose:
  
  "[As a] writer who is interested in assessing loss, which I guess is my true subject...."
  
  Okay, I definitely got loss out of the book. Pain. Abandonment. Abuse. Meticulously researched accounts of each hardship each man experienced. Each of these writers had a miserable life--so terrible that I almost forget they ever created anything beautiful. But most people don't need to read a book to realize alcoholism creates pain. Most people already know Fitzgerald's golden years turned sour quick, with beautiful Zelda withering in a mental institution, or that Papa Hemingway shot himself, old and overweight and unable to shoot Kudu in Africa anymore.
  
  I was hoping for something a little more daring. Something that asked more unusual questions than "how much pain can one person experience?" Something more than runway lights leading down a straight road to a straight answer: that alcoholics are miserable.
• 
  Richard

  A minority report about an infuriating read.
  
  The Trip to Echo Springs, is part biography, part travel writing, part psychology, part literary criticism, and only partially satisfying in whole or in part.
  
  If you've paid attention to writers, you've been through some amount of discussion about writers and drinking, and writers and suicide, and drunk writers who have committed suicide, so this book is nothing new in terms of subject matter. There's also not much new about alcohol theory or medicine.
  
  Olivia Laing spends varying amounts of time with Tennessee Williams, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, John Cheever, John Berryman, and Raymond Carver, and the more time spent with any of the given, the more she wore me out. There's detail, and there's the telling detail, and it's the latter that drives narrative - Ms. Laing spends too much time in the former, and her insights are neither subtle, nor particularly illuminating. That being said, I did pick up some interesting info/gossip about Cheever, Berryman, and Carver.
  
  Unfortunately, the author also includes her tales of travelling to salient locations in each writers career in the overall story.
  
  Olivia Laing is the stranger you sit next to at a bar who engages you in an interesting conversation only to turn it into a monologue that goes on and on reducing you to a series of "uh-huh's," as you rush to finish your drink, and wish you'd never looked in her direction.
  
  
  
  
• 
  Kristin

  Great for information about alcoholism and anecdotes about some alcoholic writers (still asking myself, though, why no female writers were discussed). Not sure she satisfactorily answers the question why writers drink. She suggests that some of these writers' best work could not have been written without the help of huge doses of alcohol, which I find very hard to believe. I'm not sure that anything of lasting merit or artistic value could be produced in a state of alcoholic oblivion. She also seems to suggest that these writers' work ultimately suffered from their self-destructive habit, which of course completely contradicts her primary thesis, though it does express what I believe to be true for the vast majority of creative people.
  
  I had read a very moving essay by Laing on loneliness, and found her writing to be exquisite in that piece. I went to the bookstore and asked for anything by her, so sure was I that I had found a true gem of a writer. Was disappointed by this book, however. Except for the occasional passage of inspired prose or the odd intuitive turn of phrase, I'd rate the writing jn this as fairly mediocre. That said, I will give her the benefit of the doubt and read her To the River with the hope that I might find some of what moved me so much in her loneliness piece.
• 
  M.R. Dowsing

  This is a sort of combination of travel writing, lit crit, biography and autobiography as Laing travels around America visiting places connected with Raymond Carver, John Cheever, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennesse Williams and John Berryman, all of whom were alcoholics. The subtitle is unfortunate I think because it doesn't explain why writers drink or even give any evidence that writers drink more than anyone else. Both the journey and the book feel self-indulgent, but it's well-written and researched and I did find it interesting despite my misgivings. A worthwhile book, then, for anyone into with an interest in American literature, alcoholism or the relationship between creativity and addiction.
• 
  Robert Vaughan

  The way this book moves between memoir, biography, travelogue is fascinating and seamless. Spellbinding. And of course, those six authors who have meant so much to the modern writer or reader. And alcohol as binding substance. My visiting friend and writer, Meg Tuite, turned me on to this book. I devoured it in less than three days. Now I want to read Laing's first book, and have already ordered her next. Do yourself a favor. Pick any of her works, and you will be so happy you did. Then slip into the sublime page and dazzle yourself.
• 
  Abby Smith

  "The Trip to Echo Spring" is a thoroughly researched and empathetic exploration of six American writers and their relationships to alcoholism. Through their stories, and Laing's own, we come to appreciate the complex motivations behind both writing and drinking. Laing's ambitious approach combined with her mastery of style and imagery make "Echo Spring" an equally enthralling and heart-wrenching read.
• 
  andrea arriaga

  mmmm no sé
  
  los travelouges de laing están xs siento, entertaining at best. pero el trabajo de entrelazar las vidas y anécdotas de los escritores me gustó mucho. chido el trabajo biográfico, aprendí muchas cosas y me conmoví muchas veces. algunas dudas sobre ciertos takes pero overall me gustó leerlo, pero no sé si me gustó el libro en sí jaja.
• 
  Cris

  Non fiction exploration of 6 writers and their alcohol addiction. Filled with personal touches. Sad but how how could it be otherwise. Not sure I got anything new but it was compassionate and well documented.