Synopses & Reviews
Note Found in a Bottle is a frank and personal story about a way of life and marriage defined by alcohol, elegantly told by one of America's most gifted writers, the author of the much acclaimed
Home Before Dark. Born into a world ruled and defined by the cocktail hour, in which the solution to any problem could be found in a dry martini or another glass of wine, Susan Cheever led a life both charmed and damned. She and her father, the celebrated writer John Cheever, were deeply affected and troubled by alcohol.
Addressing for the first time the profound effects that alcohol had on her life, in shaping her relationships with men and in influencing her as a writer, Susan Cheever has written a memoir that is shocking and revealing. She tells of her childhood obsession with the niceties of cocktails and all that they implied -- sociability, sophistication, status -- of college days spent drinking beer and cheap wine, of her three failed marriages, in which alcohol was the inescapable component, of a way of life that brought her perilously close to the edge.
Sober now, Susan Cheever looks back on that life with clear-eyed candor, in a book about recovery that is both wrenching and ultimately inspiring.
About the Author
Susan Cheever is the author of eight books, including the novel Looking for Work and Home Before Dark, a best-selling memoir about her father. She lives in New York City.
Table of Contents
Contents 1. Drinking with Daddy
2. Thunderbird off the Coast of Maine
3. The Weight of Air
4. First Love
5. We Are Always True to Brown
6. Graduation
7. Rocky Mountain Buzz
8. Drinking and the Romantic Imagination
9. Alabama 1965; Mississippi 1966
10. Fear
11. Note Found in a Bottle
12. Bow Wow
13. Beechwood
14. Parties in New York City
15. Living with the Dead
16. Fighting
17. Expatriates
18. Journalism
19. San Francisco
20. Warren After Dark
21. Opposites
22. Tais-Toi
23. Champagne
24. "I really want a drink."
25. Sarah
26. I Stop; I Start
27. The Sand at the Heart of the Pearl
28. Quad
29. The Mitchell Brothers
30. Stopping Again, Again
31. Healing
32. The Places I Went
Acknowledgments