Note Found in a Bottle

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 of 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's life -- and of the corageous journey to recovery.

Contents

1. Drinking with Daddy

2. Thunderbird off the Coast of Maine

3. The Weight of Air

4. First Love

5. We Are Always True to Brown

6. Graduation

7. Rocky Mountain Buzz

8. Drinking and the Romantic Imagination

9. Alabama 1965; Mississippi 1966

10. Fear

11. Note Found in a Bottle

12. Bow Wow

13. Beechwood

14. Parties in New York City

15. Living with the Dead

16. Fighting

17. Expatriates

18. Journalism

19. San Francisco

20. Warren After Dark

21. Opposites

22. Tais-Toi

23. Champagne

24. "I really want a drink."

25. Sarah

26. I Stop; I Start

27. The Sand at the Heart of the Pearl

28. Quad

29. The Mitchell Brothers

30. Stopping Again, Again

31. Healing

32. The Places I Went<I/>

Acknowledgments