Note Found in a Bottle (Wsp Readers Club) (Paperback)

~ (Author) "My grandmother Cheever taught me how to embroider, how to say the Lord's Prayer, and how to make a perfect dry martini..." (more)
Key Phrases: New York, First Love, Tarrytown Daily News (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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 the Hardcover edition.

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 the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Washington Square Press; 1 edition (January 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671040731
• ISBN-13: 978-0671040734
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #512,023 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Just plain bad, June 3, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Note Found in a Bottle (Hardcover)

The autobiographical drinking story has been done many times before, so the subject matter here is nothing new.

What's so striking different about this book is that there is almost no self-reflection. It's just a compilation of what Susan Cheever drank, the places Susan Cheever drank, the men Susan Cheeer screwed while she was drunk. We'd get much the same result of Susan had gone to Kitty Kelley and asked "Will you write a shallow, vapid account of my life?"

Note Found In a Bottle is self-absored and boringly so. I imagine what keeps Susan awake at night is that most people have found this account of her drinking years Not Very Interesting. She earnestly wants the reader to believe her life was glamourous, but in fact it's just an average drunk story.

I guess there are worse ways to spend (money) than to throw it away on this book....but not many.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Reality With No Answers, August 27, 1999

By	Kathy Wright (Richmond Heights, MO USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Note Found in a Bottle (Hardcover)

Susan Cheever presents a picture of an alocholic who is sophisticated, talented and brilliant, but a drunk nonetheless. In telling her no-holds- barred story, she addresses millions who believe that their accomplishments, their clothing and their connections completely separate them from the drooling, the homeless and the crazies we all know to be alcoholics. Her story presents without varnish the moral degeneration and denial of personal responsibility brought about by her drinking. She does not polish sobriety either...thank God she did not become the perfect human like so many of the reformed. Thanks to Susan for the trip through the reality that does not contain all of the answers. Too bad so many readers are willing to fault her for not trying to give what she doesn't have.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars So Light That It Floats Away, June 1, 2000

By	Jason Baer (Brooklyn, NY United States) - See all my reviews

At one point in her recent memoir 'Note Found In A Bottle', Susan Cheever tells us that looking back on her life she almost feels as though it had happened to someone else. I find that very easy to believe, because this comes off as an amatuerish biography by a not-so-close aquaintance. Reading this book, I felt as though Cheever were fast-forwarding through a poorly made movie of her life. She has clearly been through a lot and has experienced enough to write something formidable, but instead she rushes through her life stopping only to drop the occasional name. What is truly amazing to me is the lack of introspection on Cheever's part. Once in a while she attempts to analyze her past, but the attempts are shallow. Simply put, she was unable to get close enough to her own life to allow me to empathize.

It is very difficult to review a memoir, because in the end you are not only reviewing an individual's work, you are reviewing the individual. That being said, I don't think I would have enjoyed having Susan Cheever as a friend. While she seems to have made some vague connection between her past problems and her drinking, she often writes as though she were patting herself on the back for her cool friends and hip lifestyle. Now she pats herself on the back for outgrowing her desire for a drink. If only she had spent more time thinking and less time revelling in the hype she has created for herself, this could have been a book worth reading.