Q&A: Olivia Laing on the long love affair between writers and alcohol

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s second novel, “The Beautiful and Damned,” he referred to alcohol as “the rose colored glasses of life.” When taking a close look at the lives of America’s greatest authors, it may come as no surprise that often there has been a strong link between creativity and alcohol. The relationship between a writer and liquor is typically a love-hate relationship: beginning with love and following up with dependence, denial, anxiety and resentment.

It was this complicated interaction of creativity and alcoholism that inspired author Olivia Laing to write “The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking” (Picador, $26). Laing, who is the deputy books editor of the U.K. newspaper the Observer, examines this bond through the work and lives of six of America’s finest writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever and Raymond Carver.

In “The Trip to Echo Spring,” Laing takes a journey across America, piecing together a topographical map of alcoholism from Cheever’s New York to Carver’s Port Angeles. Having grown up in a family of alcoholics herself, Laing interweaves details of her own experience with the disease in the book.

We caught up with Laing by phone to discuss the deep fears and consequences that stem from being a writer with an addiction. She will be reading from and signing the book at Book Soup in West Hollywood on Sunday at 4 p.m.

How did you choose the six writers you focus on in the book?

I grew up in an alcoholic family and when I was 17, I read Tennessee Williams’ play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” That was the first time I had encountered alcoholism described in print and it was absolutely extraordinary to me. That was the foundation for the whole book, really.

And from that moment on, I was really fascinated with what writers had to say about drinking. I knew Tennessee Williams was vital and I really wanted to have a group of people that there was enough coherence around. Some of them knew each other well -- like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who were friends. And others were just interested in each other -- John Berryman was absolutely fascinated by Hemingway.

The other thing to say is that these were writers whose work I really loved. I knew that I was going to be exposing, inevitably, all kinds of things about their lives and I didn’t want this to be a hatchet job -- I didn’t want this to be a cruel book at all. It was really important to me that these were people whose work I loved and who I could look at in a complicated way.

Did you discover any interesting common threads in their personalities along the way?

Yes, so much so. I didn’t realize quite how much common ground there was. Many of them had really similar childhood setups -- they had this repeating dynamic of these very overbearing, difficult mothers and these absent fathers. You see that especially with Fitzgerald and with John Cheever. Cheever’s father was a drinker and unemployed, and his mother had this very strong character. These boys struggled with their parents and struggled with their family dynamic.

And the other thing that I really noticed was how much they suffered from anxiety and depression. You see that over and over again. Tennessee Williams, as a boy, suffered from such intense panic attacks that sometimes he would think he was going mad.

How about any common threads in the way these six writers viewed alcohol?

That’s a huge question because they view alcohol in many different ways at different times. And the thing with an alcoholic is that they are often in denial. Sometimes, they will be minimizing the role of alcohol in their lives -- sometimes they will think that it is totally fine and that their relationship with alcohol is very healthy. You get a lot of that with Hemingway -- he’ll say that alcohol is a kind of food and that drinking is the thing that makes him feel marvelous. That it doesn’t have consequences.

Drinking can be the thing that makes you feel marvelous -- that’s completely true. But, it does have consequences and through their lives, you really see those consequences unfold. The effects that alcohol has on the brain, the effects it has on the physical body and the effects it has on all the relationships that one gets into.

What they have in common is an initial love for alcohol. And then an unwillingness to face the kind of role it has taken in their lives. And the ones who went on into recovery -- which is John Berryman (whose recovery was unsuccessful), John Cheever (whose recovery was successful) and Raymond Carver (whose recovery was successful) -- they had a very painful process to go through of working out exactly what their real relationship with alcohol is: the detailing arc of the consequences it has had on their lives -- which I think all of them found excruciating.

Your title comes from a line in Tennessee William’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” What was it about that line that resonated so strongly?

Echo Spring is a real bourbon -- it’s a Kentucky bourbon. The character Brick is an alcoholic; he says repeatedly, “I’m takin’ a little short trip to Echo Spring.” But he means, “I’m going to drink bourbon. I’m going to go to the liquor cabinet again.”

I felt that he also meant something else and I think that’s the reason Tennessee chose that particular bourbon in the line. Echo Spring seemed like this magical place and I think people drink to get drunk, but they’re also drinking to escape somewhere. And that seemed to catch the idea that that place is symbolic, as well as real. And I wanted people to look at that aspect of it as well in my work.

Did you consider including a female writer in the mix?

Yes, and I’m aware that there’s this shadow book that I could have written which would have looked at people like Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras and Elizabeth Bishop -- the many very, very interesting women writers.

The reason why I didn’t do that is because my experience as a child was with a female alcoholic and it hit too close to home for me. I found it acutely painful to write even the very small amounts that I did and I didn’t feel that I could handle it.

How much of your own personal experience did you choose to weave into the book?

I really only wrote about three pages in the entirety of the book about my experiences. And honestly, those three pages were unbelievably hard to write. Much harder than I had bargained for.

The whole structure of an alcoholic family is organized around denial and secrecy -- and breaking those bonds is actually incredibly hard. But I felt like it would be quite disingenuous to write this study of alcohol in literature without bringing in how very much my own life has been marked by alcoholism.

While writing the book, did you personally ever drink in order to better understand the effects alcohol has on the creative process?

I’ve never been able to write drunk. My hat goes off to people who can do it! But no, that would be terrible!

I think the real thing about a writer’s life is that you have this intense isolation and you’re living in a world inside your head for a long time. And then you come out and your work is criticized and scrutinized. Those are two very different personalities that can handle those things. I can see how those pressures can encourage drinking or at least play a part in it. I think that was the point where I thought, “Wow, I can see why you might want to drink a couple bottles of wine at the end of the day.”

You really see it with Tennessee Williams as the critics begin to turn on him and his plays start to fail. The humiliation is so public and so visceral -- there are these empty theaters, people aren’t coming, the run has come to an end, people are writing appalling things about him in the press. The kind of writing he does requires a very raw, sensitive and open personality, which just isn’t designed for that sort of pressure.

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