"Susan Cheever... includes a heart-lacerating quote by her father: 'If you are an artist, self-destruction is quite expected of you.'"

"'The thrill of staring into the abyss is exciting until it becomes, as it did in my case, contemptible.' She notes that 'all five of our twentieth-century literature Nobel laureates were alcoholic — Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck.' (A proud tally.) And those are the ones who made it to the top. Lots of other great writers who didn’t receive the Nobel laurel were just as pie-eyed. Today, the pendulum seems to have swung again. Cheever says that most of our leading literary figures are fairly abstemious. Whether this will make for more interesting biographies remains to be seen."

From Christopher Buckley's review of Susan Cheever's "Drinking in America: Our Secret History."