Note Found in a Bottle: My Life as a Drinker

"Even in my family, where God knows we have experienced enough alcoholism to have drawn a few conclusions and recognize a few signs, alcoholism is still invisible". This memoir is an excellent example of alcoholism in women which is different than alcoholism in men. Women are more vulnerable to alcohol and develop alcoholism drinking much smaller quantities than men. The line of alcoholism is invisible. So, when Susan Cheever drank in pace with her father and then with her husband, she was already an alcoholic. She describes how alcohol is woven into the fabric of her life from the beginning. "My grandmother Cheever taught me how to embroider, how to say the Lord's Prayer, and how to make a perfect dry martini." Alcoholism is a genetic vulnerability. "I grew up with a secret. My family did have a skeleton in the closet. ... But the real family secret was not my father's bisexuality, it was the drinking." Alcoholism has at it's core a dysfunctional relationship between the drinker and the drink. This dysfunction is invisible to the drinker. "If you told me that the problems in my life came from my breathing, it would have made as much sense to me if you said the problems in m life came from my drinking." "Even when my father took me to AA meetings, I never dreamed that I might be an alcoholic." "I didn't know that I had to stop drinking. I didn't know that I could stop drinking." Susan Cheever lived the life of alcoholism... superficial, filled with shame, unpredictable. It is a life that looks for solutions outside of oneself ~ money, sex, manipulation. She describes this in her life. What is missing is an internal life. A woman loses herself in the process. "And somehow, I spent all of those years searching, searching for someplace where I did belong..." When she develops this internal life, she does so the only way it can be done... "I don't understand God; I just believe in God". In the end she "gets" it... it is the "getting" it that is unique for each individual and too personal to describe. "It seems my belief in God should take up more space in this book, but it is intensely private and truly beyond my ability to describe." I feel this book is a worthwhile read.

I honor Ms. Cheever for exposing her life in such a way that illuminates the denial and distortion that accompanies this disease. I thought it was extremely well written and unsparing prose. I recommend this book to anyone with a soul which has been cracked and mended. She has real talent; I hope she remembers that when she reads some of the detritus herein.

There can be no contesting that this book was well-written, compelling, and honest. What seems to peeve some is the fact that she came from wealth, and that she had troubled relationships. This has nothing to do with the quality of her book, which is superb. I will seek out other works by this author, and I applaud her honesty, her candor, and her finely honed skills. I hope she is not deterred by the cruelty innate in this forum, or by the bitterness of the obscure and the judgemental. Cheever inherited more than alcoholism from her father: she inherited his craft. Well done.

Susan Cheever has written a sad and elegant book about alcoholism. NOTE FOUND IN A BOTTLE makes plain that regardless of the privilege of being a member of an honored American literary family -- and the good things that come with it -- alcoholism surely and subtly eroded the foundations of that life. The book describes good fortune turned into something quite else, a life rocked by the kind of devil that fame and money and influential friends can't dislodge. Her alcoholism, as Miss Cheever tells it, needed to be quieted by other means, and slowly, with difficulty and with help, understood. As a reader, I am moved by her struggle, its failures and its moments of grace; I'm thankful for the understanding she offers: Alcoholism will wreck your life from the inside out, no matter what that life might look like. Surely this is a message that can't be delivered too often.

Don't be touted off this book by thinking, great, just what the world needs, another tell-all by a reformed drunk. There is so much here. Any book by one of the Cheevers merits a look and this is one I have waited for for a long time. It could have been much longer but Susan Cheever cuts out all the extraneous matter and gets to the core of her struggle with alcohol. We all struggle with something and reading such an honest account not only entertains and informs, it helps to lighten our own load and put it in some clearer perspective. If I had any complaints about the book, she drops a few too many names for my taste. We know the author knows and is friends with a lot of famous people. To be reminded as often as we are slows us down and is a tad annoying. But just when you think there is no way to turn an old subject into something fresh and alive, pick up this book and be surprised.