all six of these writers were alcoholics,and the subject of drinking surfaces insome of their finest work, from cat on hat tin roof to a moveable feast. often,they did their drinking together : hemingway and fitzglerald ricocheting through the cafes of the paris in the 1920 carver and cheever speeding to liquor store in lawa in the icy winter of1973 .
Olivia laing grew up in an alcoholic family herself. One spring, wanting to make sense of this ferocious, entangling disease, she took a journy across america that plunged her into the heart of these overlapping lives. She pieces together a topographical map of