Alcoholism

In deciding to write a book about her forebears and herself, Juliet Nicolson follows in their footsteps. Given that her grandparents were Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, and her father was Nigel Nicolson, that they all wrote copiously about themselves, that Knole and Sissinghurst are stuffed with family records, and that she is herself a publisher turned writer, it proved impossible to resist adding her voice to the already substantial record of her family’s powerful social and literary connections. For a long time she was impressed by something her grandmother’s lover, Virginia Woolf, once said to her father: ‘Nothing has really happened until it is written down.’ She rejects this

Eileen is an accomplished, disturbing and creepily funny first novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, the latest darling of the Paris Review, which has published her stories and given her a prize. It recalls, half a century later, a week in the life of Eileen Dunlop, leading up to Christmas 1964. Her mother, whom she loathed, has died some years ago, and at the age of 24 Eileen is living in a dreary New England town she calls ‘X-ville’ with her father. He’s a demented, gin-sodden retired cop whom she also loathes, and whom she is supposedly looking after, though her care is limited to shouting at him, maintaining his gin supply

The title of this book tells you a lot. Jack Sutherland, who grew up in London and Los Angeles, worked as a personal assistant to Michael Stipe, the singer in REM and, later, to Mickey Rourke. He also worked as a limo driver in Hollywood. A drug addict, he gravitated toward crystal meth, which can make you both wired and horny, sometimes for days on end. So we know to expect a particular brew of glamour, indignity and recrimination that perhaps some readers (including me) have come to enjoy. Sutherland certainly delivers — with a bit of glamour, an awful lot of indignity and not too much recrimination. But there’s

‘If I were to go mad,’ Amy Liptrot writes in her memoir of alcoholism and the Orkneys, ‘It would come as no surprise at all.’ One surprise of this book is its sanity, which is remarkable, given Liptrot’s beginnings. We open, unforgettably, with her parents passing each other on an island runway. Her mother is being flown home from hospital, holding the newborn Amy; her father, in the grip of a manic episode and a strait jacket, is heading the other way. Liptrot recalls another fit which drove him to smash all the windows of the family farm and hide with her, aged 11, from the police and doctors. ‘As

Often, Christmas is a time for moaning after the night before, when the seasonal drinking is remembered (if remembered at all) with bewilderment and a degree of guilt. The illusion of drink-fuelled happiness — what James Joyce called ‘tighteousness’ — is familiar to most of us, even if the hangover seems a cruel price. The most effective remedy for a thumping head is to take a hair of the dog that bit you. Eddie Condon, the jazzman, recommended two quarts of bourbon; Samuel Taylor Coleridge swore by a breakfast of laudanum and fried eggs. By rights, the hangover should curb further drinking. Nobody wants to see their tongue pale and

Few first novels are as successful as S.J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep, which married a startling and unusual premise to a tightly controlled and claustrophobic thriller. Its only drawback was that it was a hard act to follow. Novelists tend to dump all their brilliant ideas into their first book, and the white heat of originality compensates to some extent for any want of craft. Second novels lack both advantages, and have the additional problem that readers come to them laden with expectations. Like its predecessor, Second Life is a slice of domestic noir with a woman narrator. It is set mainly in affluent corners of London, with

George Bernard Shaw called him a ‘Yankee Shakespeare peopling his isle with Calibans’. He was dubbed ‘a fighting Tolstoy’ and ‘the great American blues man of the theatre’. Before he was 35, Eugene O’Neill had emerged as the first real titan of American theatre, a preeminence he has never lost. When Sinclair Lewis was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1930, he responded that they should have given it to O’Neill, because he had done ‘nothing much in American drama save to transform it utterly… from a false world of neat and competent trickery to a world of splendour and fear and greatness’. O’Neill’s struggle to wrench American theatre into splendour,

Gin Glorious Gin: How Mother’s Ruin Became the Spirit of London is a jaunty and diverting history of ‘a wonderful drink that embodies the best of London’, which is a judgment that would raise eyebrows even at closing time in Soho. It is not a remotely scholarly book. There are no notes or index, and on the second page Olivia Williams informs us that the first citation for gin in the OED is from 1714, as ‘an infamous liquor’. It’s actually from 1723, as ‘the infamous liquor’ — mere details, but still. I stopped checking things after that. It’s essentially a book for people who enjoy gin but don’t necessarily

Vernon Scannell was a thief, a liar, a deserter, a bigamist, a fraud, an alcoholic, a woman-beater and a coward. Plenty of material for a biography, then, especially given that he was also a novelist, a critic, a memoirist, a boxer, a teacher, a broadcaster, a loyal friend, a passionate lover and ‘a fun grandfather’. Most of all, he was a poet. Walking Wounded was the title of a Scannell poem and collection published in 1965, and James Andrew Taylor is right to use it as the title for this biography. Beaten viciously by a thug of a father, uncomforted by an unloving mother, by the time he was 19

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. Where did he get that? The previous night’s drinking is remembered (if remembered at all) with bewilderment and guilt. Of course, the illusion of drink-fuelled happiness is familiar to most of us, even if the hangover seems a cruel price to pay. Olivia Laing, in her study of six alcoholic American writers, The Trip to Echo Spring (the