Amazon.com Review
"My grandmother Cheever taught me how to embroider, how to say the Lord's Prayer, and how to make a perfect dry martini." Alcoholism seems to have been a family tradition among the Cheevers. The posthumous publication of pater John Cheever's journals revealed both his fondness for the bottle and his bisexuality; daughter Susan has gone her father one better, publishing a memoir of promiscuity and drunkenness while still alive. In Note in a Bottle, she leaves little to the imagination as she chronicles her career, her many sexual escapades and, of course, her drinking. A typical passage goes something like this:
Warren knows San Francisco so well it's like being in his own house to be there with him. He took me to a bar with wooden booths. We ate delicious chowder and drank white wine. He drank vodka and grapefruit; it was lunchtime but I could see he had just gotten up. I wondered who he had been in bed with. I drank more white wine.... "I still love you," he said, and he kissed me. I was late for dinner with Calvin.
The early sections of Cheever's memoir, in which she describes the culture of drinking in the '50s and '60s, are quite interesting; the problem is (to rewrite Tolstoy), all unhappy drunks are the same. Once Cheever shifts her focus to her own personal catalog of cocktails and dysfunctional affairs, she becomes interchangeable with any number of other alcoholics who have trod that slippery slope before her. And as the details of her various messy marriages or affairs (or both) with Robert, with Calvin, with Warren, et. al pile up, one finds oneself wishing for a little less history and a little more mystery. Still,
Note in a Bottle contains some astute observation delivered in Susan Cheever's appealingly ironic prose style and some interesting insights into the rarified world of the literati that she inhabits.
--Margaret Prior
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
"Like all alcoholics," Cheever (Home Before Dark) writes in this brutally frank memoir, "I worshipped at the shrine of my own heart." Having studied under her father, John Cheever, a master of alcohol, she was a true acolyte. In her childhood memories, home was a place where "guests were always falling down the stairs," but she never thought much of it as she approached adulthood, braced by her grip on a trusty, eternally full glass. She drank in Alabama and Mississippi during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, in England and France in the 1970s and in New York City all the time. By her own account she was a spoiled, self-centered woman who knew that daddy's money could always be wired to her anywhere in the world. Alcohol warped her sense of judgment about men: she fell in love with a batterer and a perpetual ne'er-do-well drunkard and thought nothing of sleeping with three men in one day. Slowly she realized that she "was a disaster waiting to happen." With the birth of a daughter and a son she began to understand that "drinking doesn't absolve anyone of responsibility." As her drinking stopped, she also stopped "manipulating men and thinking that other people's pain was funny" and found a belief in God. Similar to Pete Hamill's A Drinking Life and Caroline Knapp's Drinking: A Love Story, this is a powerful story written in precise, emotionally intense prose. Although she doesn't go into the details of how she got sober, her story will be of invaluable assistance and support to those who are traveling the chilling road that seduced, then nearly killed Susan Cheever.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
