Author Olivia Laing in conversation with Lorin Stein (The Paris Review) on writers and drinking.

In Olivia Laing’s stunning work of unconventional biography, The Trip to Echo Spring, she delves deep into the lives of six of America’s most revered yet notoriously troubled writers: John Cheever, Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and the poet John Berryman.

She travels by train, plane, and highway to the key locations of each of these men’s lives, from Key West to New Orleans, and from New York City to Washington state, seeing for herself the places that inspired much of their most famous works.

While there has been considerable scholarship on each writer, nobody until now has ever examined the clearest link between them: alcohol, and lots of it. Laing penetrates, with her astute and always engaging eye, the fascinating turbulent life of each author, revealing stunning truths about each one.

Olivia Laing is a writer and critic. Her first book, To the River, was published by Canongate Books to widespread acclaim and shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and the Dolman Travel Book of the Year. She has been the deputy books editor of The Observer and writes for a variety of publications, including The Guardian, New Statesman, and The Times Literary Supplement. She is a MacDowell Fellow, and has received grants from the Arts Council and the Authors’ Foundation. She lives in Cambridge.

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