Blogging from the Bookshop: On Olivia Laing's The Trip to Echo Spring

"I'd been banging my head against these questions for months, years. The three-way relationship between childhood experience, alcohol and writing. I'd read paper after paper about early life stresses and mediating factors, about the hand-me-down catastrophe of genetic disposition and the unearned luck of genetic resilience. I'd read about castration complexes and death drives and how Hemingway's mother was the dark queen of his internal world and in the midst of all these things I could hear the stripped-down elements of Berryman's poem: five words, clicking like beads on an abacus. 

Hunger, liquor, need, pieces, wrote."

- Olivia Laing

Although a tumbler of good scotch and a lit cigarette might seem like the height of romance,
this still life follows on the heels of some unimaginable disaster. 

The Trip to Echo Spring On Writers and Drinking, by Olivia Laing. Picador, 2013. 352 pages; 30$. In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing finally brings two of our favourite pastimes together. Focusing on the lives and work of famous male writers and notorious drunks F. Scott. Fizgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman and John Cheever, Laing explores the disquieting connection between manic creativity and the often debilitating influence of alcoholism in the life of each, embarking on a journey that takes her from Cheever's New York to Carver's Port Angeles. Having grown up in and struggled with an alcoholic family herself, Laing's interest here is not purely academic, and her journey forms "a topographical map of alcoholism, from the horrors of addiction to the miraculous possibilities of recovery." Mixing memoir, travelogue, and literary biography and coming with endorsements from the likes of Nick Cave and Hilary Mantel, The Trip to Echo Spring looks to be one of the most original non-fiction titles of the year. It's quickly making its way to the top of more than a couple reading lists around here.

Mr Cheever, I Hardly Knew Ye

Just in case any of you are going through Rosenblum withdrawals -- she has not, after all, posted for a week -- I've decided to link to her most recent post at her own blog, Rose-coloured. She has an interesting post on Cheever, and the surprisingly common reader fallacy that the writer and his or her characters are one and the same. You can read her whole post here; below, though, a sizable excerpt.

Even before *Once* came out, I was amazed at how generous readers were in sharing what they thought of my work. It's not like I'm deluged with fanmail, but a good number of people have bothered to send me a note, or say a word to me at an event, to share their reactions to my stories.

And though really that's why anyone wants to publish anything--to get people thinking about these characters and situations that have been in the writer's head--I didn't really know how thrilling it would be see my imaginings refracted through other imaginations like this. I've enjoyed everything expressed to me, including "I just didn't get it" (more than once)...it's important for me to learn about ways my work can misfire. No one ever got better by dwelling on successes.

Of course, everyone's been pretty nice--I'm sure I wouldn't appreciate negative feedback if it came in the form of people yelling "you suck!" at readings. But there is one comment that's come up a couple times, always voiced as a compliment, that does trouble me: variations on "I feel as though I've read your diary."

A big scary hurdle of publishing is accepting the idea that I can't control how people read the work once it's out there; if people enjoy thinking of all the characters I write as manifestations of Rebecca Rosenblum...uh, I guess I have to go with that.

But I wish they wouldn't. And not only because I am not a terribly autobiographical writer and that's not how *I* read the characters. Of course I use real life sometimes--it is right there, after all. Besides, all my ideas come from inside my own head, so they all reflect me to some degree (I believe I'm paraphrasing Margaret Atwood there, but I can't find an attribution). I'm sure if a person with the right degrees read any book with enough attention, he or she could construct a reasonably accurate psychological profile of the author.