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Books

A Trip to Echo Spring, by Olivia Laing - review

10 August 2013

9:00 AM

10 August 2013

9:00 AM

The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink Olivia Laing

Canongate, pp.340, £20

The boozer’s life is one of low self-esteem and squalid self-denial. It was memorably evoked by Charles Jackson in his 1944 novel The Lost Weekend; having hocked his typewriter for a quart of rye, the writer Don Birnam spends his lost weekend in a New York psychiatric ward, with a fractured skull.

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