Book Description
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.