A Trip to Echo Spring, by Olivia Laing – review

The boozer’s life is one of low self-esteem and squalid self-denial. It was memorably evoked by Charles Jackson in his 1944 novel The Lost Weekend; having hocked his typewriter for a quart of rye, the writer Don Birnam spends his lost weekend in a New York psychiatric ward, with a fractured skull. Where did he get that? The previous night’s drinking is remembered (if remembered at all) with bewilderment and guilt. Of course, the illusion of drink-fuelled happiness is familiar to most of us, even if the hangover seems a cruel price to pay.

Olivia Laing, in her study of six alcoholic American writers, The Trip to Echo Spring (the title is taken from a Tennessee Williams play), demonstrates that one hardly need drink every day to be alcoholic. Those of us who indulge in self-destructive benders with stretches of sobriety in between may not think of ourselves as alcoholic at all.