Note Found In a Bottle - Softcover

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.

Addressing for the first time the profound effects that drinking had on her life, in shaping her relationships with men and in influencing her as a writer, Susan Cheever delivers an elegant memoir of clear-eyed candor and unsettling immediacy. 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.

At once devastating and inspiring, NOTE FOUND IN A BOTTLE offers a startlingly intimate portrait of the alcoholic life -- and of the courageous journey to recovery.