The English author of The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking did attend an open New York City meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous in researching the book, just published in the U.S., but she’s not one to stand up and say, “Hello, my name is Olivia Laing, and I am an alcoholic.”

Rather, she grew up with one. In 1981, when she was four years old, her father left the family. Her mother’s next live-in romantic partner, a woman named Diana, now sober more than two decades, was often in a drunken rage. Laing, who has been deputy books editor of the Observer and writes literary criticism for The Times Literary Supplement, among other publications, is driven both by a passion for literature and an effort to restore pieces of her childhood lost to trauma and its blunting of memory.

She closes her irreverent and haunting book with a list of The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, highlighting their widespread and acutely personal influence. In her own writing process, she seems to have taken Step 4 (“Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves”) to heart. Rarely are we allowed to see so clearly the underbelly of a writer’s motivation for choosing her biographical subject, or in this case, subjects.

NPR summarizes the book (which takes its Echo Spring title from a bourbon reference in Tennessee Williams's play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) as “a literary pilgrimage to the haunts of six American writers who were also prodigious drinkers: John Berryman, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Tennessee Williams. Laing analyzes their life and work anew, with their alcoholism as a throughline, using her distinctive hybrid mix of literary criticism, biography, memoir and atmospheric travel writing.”

By letting the reader in on her personal investment in the subject, Laing creates an immediate rapport based in a value at the core of AA: the transformative power of rigorously honest storytelling. By getting to know Laing through this raw vulnerability, it’s possible to empathize with the urgency in her literary and personal quest. “I’d been banging my head against those questions for months, years. The three-way relationship between childhood experience, alcohol, and writing,” she writes, impatient for understanding as she travels to places where her subjects lived, drank themselves into oblivion, and sometimes intersected in pursuit of booze: Williams, Cheever, and Fitzgerald in New York City; Hemingway and Williams in Key West; Williams in New Orleans; and Carver, in Seattle.

To close her journey, Laing visits Raymond Carver’s grave on a bluff above the town of Port Angeles in Washington, where she opens a black metal box at the burial site to find a spiral-bound notebook stored in a Ziploc bag. Reading through pages of visitors’ confessions, many about their own struggles with sobriety, she’s moved to tears (as I was in reading her account).

“In the end, recovery depends on faith, of one kind or another,” she muses. “It struck me then that by driving out to a writer’s grave, all these anonymous, suffering strangers were putting their faith in stories, in the capacity of literature to somehow salve a sense of soreness, to make one feel less flinchingly alone. I thought of myself as a child, of how I became a reader because tracts of my life were unendurable.”

After delving into so much disturbing content -- from families ravaged by drink to suicides slow and sudden (in the book’s most striking image of addiction, she accounts for Berryman the Pulitzer-winning poet and professor defecating in a university hall) -- Laing manages to close on an uplifting note. With Berryman’s previously quoted Dream Songs --

Hunger was constitutional with him,
wine, cigarettes, liquor, need need need
until he went to pieces.
The pieces sat up & wrote

-- running through her blood, she writes of the need “…to take a hold of yourself, to gather up the broken parts. That’s when recovery begins. That’s when the second life -- the good one -- starts.”