The Problem Lives of Olivia Laing’s The Trip to Echo Spring

How I Came Across Olivia Laing’s The Trip to Echo Spring

Audiobooks are weird for me. I can’t do fiction books. They don’t keep my interest, which means I get lost. Yet, nonfiction seems to work well. But being me, I enjoy reading nonfiction books about people who write fiction. This fascination led me to Olivia Laing’s The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking.

First of all, I did the audiobook for this Echo Spring. Using my local library’s connection to Hoopla, I was able to check this book out like a library book and have it on my phone. This is not a paid ad for Hoopla. I wouldn’t take their money, but I will preach their gospel.

My Review

Kate Reading did the narration, and she was magnificent in the role. She really understood Ms. Laing’s voice to where the two of them merged in my mind. This is not something I have experienced with an audiobook before. Most narrations sound just like that — a narration. But this one had the sound of someone sharing vivid memories.

So what do memories have to do with a book entitled The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking? Well, it’s not just about writers but the writer itself. It’s part biographies, part travelogue, and part memoir.

So how well does the book do all three? Well, the first part is fantastic, the second is good, and the third suffers from the first.

When Ms. Laing focuses on the writers’ lives, this book flourishes. The authors she chose — Tennessee Willaims, John Cheever, Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and John Berryman — were all men with deep dark secrets that go beyond drinking. Fitzgerald was horrible to Zelda, Cheever was homophobic bisexual, and Hemingway and Berryman took their own lives. These demons may have led them to drink, or they were demons because of drink. Very few escaped the addition to drink.

Ms. Laing doesn’t make excuses for these men. She presents the case plainly, and, in particular, in Cheever’s case, she understood that overcoming alcohol was a significant victory in his life. (I’m currently reading Blake Bailey’s biography of Cheever, and he doesn’t celebrate it enough). Carver, who probably had the only real success story of the six, is also praised for sticking to his guns about what made him a different writer when he was sober.

The best compliment that I can pay Ms. Laing is that she made me want to know more. While I read most of these authors in high school or college, I never really read them deeply. So I found some used copies of their works, and they are on my nightstand right now. Furthermore, I want to have a more complete biography, so I have been listening to all 28 hours of the Cheever bio and reading the biography of Berryman (both on Hoopla!).

The travelogue section is very good. I don’t know if it’s because of geographical bias, but only New Orleans came to life. New York came close, but it is New York. None of the other locations really made a mark on me.

The memoir part of a Olivia Liang’s The Trip to Echo Spring is the most flawed part of the story for me. I realize that sounds sexist. Ms. Laing has had some harrowing experiences with alcohol, and those parts are as strong as the part about the authors’ lives. What makes her story less exciting is that she is a better human being than these men. She understands her demons. Except for Carver, they never got over their hangups or misanthropic ways. They were all terribly flawed humans, and some were just flat out terrible. She can’t compete with that.

However, her prose never turns you off, even when she is giving you information about herself that you don’t need. If this had been two books, one of the authors’ lives and a memoir, they would both be masterpieces. The writing is that good. Bridging them together though, often had me wanting to get back to the lives of the six men.

Ms. Laing deserves better than that.