The Trip to Echo Spring
On Writers and Drinking
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The Trip to Echo Spring
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Narrated by:
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Kate Reading
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By:
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Olivia Laing
About this listen
Olivia Laing's widely acclaimed account of why some of the best literature has been created by writers in the grip of alcoholism
In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six of America's finest writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver.
All six of these men were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast. Often, they did their drinking together: Hemingway and Fitzgerald ricocheting through the cafes of Paris in the 1920s; Carver and Cheever speeding to the liquor store in Iowa in the icy winter of 1973.
Olivia Laing grew up in an alcoholic family herself. One spring, wanting to make sense of this ferocious, entangling disease, she took a journey across America that plunged her into the heart of these overlapping lives. As she travels from Cheever's New York to Williams' New Orleans, and from Hemingway's Key West to Carver's Port Angeles, she pieces together a topographical map of alcoholism, from the horrors of addiction to the miraculous possibilities of recovery. Beautiful, captivating, and original, The Trip to Echo Spring strips away the myth of the alcoholic writer to reveal the terrible price creativity can exert.
©2019 Olivia Laing (P)2019 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
What listeners say about The Trip to Echo Spring
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- EEL
- 07-11-22
Basically clear narration with slight issues
From other reviews, I gather that Kate Reading's delivery might not be to everyone's taste. I've enjoyed her slightly arch sounding rendering of James Greer's _Bad Eminence_ and Gertrude Stein's _Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas_ but one might object that in these books that the narrators are either American or have an American accent according to the book itself, whereas Laing is a Brit and the narrating voice is clearly hers in this book so I found it rather jarring to have the wrong accent here. The other thing I wish some sound proof-listener would say to Reading is that writing a date 1 December 1971 is a convention in writing (avoiding the signalling of the ordinal by a superscript 'th' since this is implied) and is not meant to be read 'one December...' but rather, as would be natural for a date 'the first of December...'. This book has a *lot* of dates and I found their continual cardinalization rather annoying.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance1 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- HeyDon't.
- 01-07-19
Auto-tune????
Fab book as one would expect from this author - but the narration?! What's going on? Sounds like it has been digitally 'processed' in some way. If it hasn't - the narrator should get a job in artificial intelligence.
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- spj
- 01-10-21
Fine book, great narration
Excellent book. Beautifully written. The lives of the writers discussed were often bleak, but the book is ultimately about recovery. These days I take comfort in reading about alcohol rather than drinking it.
Kate Reading does a superb job with the narration. She gets the perfect tone for the material.
My only quibble (and it would have been an editorial decision) is the Americanisation of the dates in the book. Olivia Laing is a British writer, but we hear "five June" rather than "the fifth of June".
I'm going to check out Olivia Laing's other books.
I also hope that Kate Reading gets to read more titles like this.
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1 person found this helpful