"My grandmother Cheever taught me how to embroider, how to say the Lord's Prayer, and how to make a perfect dry martini."

Alcoholism seems to have been a family tradition among the Cheevers. The posthumous publication of pater John Cheever's journals revealed both his fondness for the bottle and his bisexuality; daughter Susan has gone her father one better, publishing a memoir of promiscuity and drunkenness while still alive. In Note in a Bottle, she leaves little to the imagination as she chronicles her career, her many sexual escapades and, of course, her drinking. A typical passage goes something like this: Warren knows San Francisco so well it's like being in his own house to be there with him. He took me to a bar with wooden booths. We ate delicious chowder and drank white wine. He drank vodka and grapefruit; it was lunchtime but I could see he had just gotten up. I wondered who he had been in bed with. I drank more white wine.... "I still love you," he said, and he kissed me. I was late for dinner with Calvin. The early sections of Cheever's memoir, in which she describes the culture of drinking in the '50s and '60s, are quite interesting; the problem is (to rewrite Tolstoy), all unhappy drunks are the same. Once Cheever shifts her focus to her own personal catalog of cocktails and dysfunctional affairs, she becomes interchangeable with any number of other alcoholics who have trod that slippery slope before her. And as the details of her various messy marriages or affairs (or both) with Robert, with Calvin, with Warren, et. al pile up, one finds oneself wishing for a little less history and a little more mystery. Still, Note in a Bottle contains some astute observation delivered in Susan Cheever's appealingly ironic prose style and some interesting insights into the rarified world of the literati that she inhabits. --Margaret Prior

From Publishers Weekly
"Like all alcoholics," Cheever (Home Before Dark) writes in this brutally frank memoir, "I worshipped at the shrine of my own heart." Having studied under her father, John Cheever, a master of alcohol, she was a true acolyte. In her childhood memories, home was a place where "guests were always falling down the stairs," but she never thought much of it as she approached adulthood, braced by her grip on a trusty, eternally full glass. She drank in Alabama and Mississippi during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, in England and France in the 1970s and in New York City all the time. By her own account she was a spoiled, self-centered woman who knew that daddy's money could always be wired to her anywhere in the world. Alcohol warped her sense of judgment about men: she fell in love with a batterer and a perpetual ne'er-do-well drunkard and thought nothing of sleeping with three men in one day. Slowly she realized that she "was a disaster waiting to happen." With the birth of a daughter and a son she began to understand that "drinking doesn't absolve anyone of responsibility." As her drinking stopped, she also stopped "manipulating men and thinking that other people's pain was funny" and found a belief in God. Similar to Pete Hamill's A Drinking Life and Caroline Knapp's Drinking: A Love Story, this is a powerful story written in precise, emotionally intense prose. Although she doesn't go into the details of how she got sober, her story will be of invaluable assistance and support to those who are traveling the chilling road that seduced, then nearly killed Susan Cheever. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
"I grew up with a secret," Cheever writes?the secret of alcoholism. It was years before her father, novelist John Cheever, sought help for his drinking and longer before Susan did the same. But with three failed marriages, she knew that her life was not as it should be. Here she recalls growing up with alcohol, from the grandmother who taught her how to embroider, say the Lord's Prayer, and make a perfect martini to the medical problems her own daughter suffered from having an alcoholic mother. This anecdotal memoir sometimes seems disjointed and incomplete?we never find out how Cheever finally gave up alcohol, for example?but her style is candid and moving. Though she never wanted to be a writer or a mother, she says, writing is what brought her success and her two children have taught her love. For larger literary collections or libraries where recovery from alcoholism would be of interest.-?Nancy Patterson Shires, East Carolina Univ., Greenville, NCCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Sarah Payne Stuart
...when Cheever takes control, as she does in the earlier parts of this memoir, then her writing has true resonance.

From Booklist
Simultaneously sobering and intoxicating, Note Found in a Bottle is a touching memoir that also offers a fascinating look at America's drinking habits during the past few decades. Without preaching or moralizing, Cheever describes her life as a drinker, analyzing the part that alcoholism played in her marriages, her friendships, and her career. Beginning with the memory of being taught to make a martini at the age of six by her grandmother, Cheever uses anecdote to illuminate the various roles that alcohol plays in American culture: as a social lubricant, as an emotional anesthetic, and as a status symbol. Cheever demonstrates the insidious progression of her own addiction to alcohol, and shares with us her own struggle to gain control of her life. Wonderfully free of self-recrimination or simplistic self-righteousness, Note Found in a Bottle compassionately gives insight into the nature of addiction and the demons of the addicted. Bonnie Johnston

From Kirkus Reviews
A memoir that floats like a sad song, with its themes the effervescence of champagne and the flatness of the morning after. Cheever (A Woman's Life, 1994) has written about her life and her family's before, notably in Home Before Dark, her memoir of her father, John. This book changes the angle of the mirror, focusing on the role of alcohol in her growing up, her affairs and marriages, the birth of her two children, and her work. Drinking was her heritage: The ship on which her ancestors came to the New World carried ``three times as much beer as water, along with ten thousand gallons of wine.'' Her grandmother taught her how to mix martinis when she was six years old. In her family's suburban household, drinks were taken before, during, and after dinner and at Sunday brunch. In college, and later in the Deep South during the civil rights summers of 1965 and 1966, she found herself a part of ``a bunch of us kids from Ivy League colleges . . . [who] went to parties and drank a lot. . . . '' Cheever, now fiftysomething, rafted through life on a river of alcohol; her pain was dulled, but so were her judgment and memory. She accompanied her father to AA meetings, yet even though the stories told sometimes paralleled hers, there was always a detail ``too bizarre'' to let her label herself as an alcoholic. Her two children finally moved her to stop drinking, and a new belief in God allowed her to succeed. ``They say that drinking is a low-level search for God,'' Cheever avers; now newor restoredfaith in God has reportedly moved her to another level. A poignant and forthright tale of a rugged journey by an extraordinarily gifted writerwho may be borrowing from her father's story to define her own life. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
Kirkus Reviews A memoir that floats like a sad song, with its themes the effervescence of champagne and the flatness of the morning after....A poignant and fortright tale of a rugged journey by amd extraordinarily gifted writer.

Book Description
Born into a world ruled and defined by the cocktail hour, in which the solution to any problem could be found in a dry martini or another glass of wine, Susan Cheever led a life both charmed and damned. She and her father, the celebrated writer John Cheever, were deeply affected and troubled by alcohol. Addressing for the first time the profound effects that alcohol had on her life, in shaping of her relationships with men and in influencing her as a writer, Susan Cheever delivers an elegant memoir of clear-eyed candor and unsettling immediacy. She tells of her childhood obsession with the niceties of cocktails and all that they implied -- sociability, sophistication, status; of college days spent drinking beer and cheap wine; of her three failed marriages, in which alcohol was the inescapable component, of a way of life that brought her perilously close to the edge. At once devastating and inspiring, Note Found in a Bottle offers a startlingly intimate portrait of the alcoholic's life -- and of the corageous journey to recovery.

About the Author
Susan Cheever is the author of eight books, including the novel Looking for Work and the best-selling memoirs Home Before Dark and Treetops. She lives in New York City.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Born into a world ruled and defined by the cocktail hour, in which the solution to any problem could be found in a dry martini or another glass of wine, Susan Cheever led a life both charmed and damned. She and her father, the celebrated writer John Cheever, were deeply affected and troubled by alcohol.

Addressing for the first time the profound effects that alcohol had on her life, in shaping of her relationships with men and in influencing her as a writer, Susan Cheever delivers an elegant memoir of clear-eyed candor and unsettling immediacy. She tells of her childhood obsession with the niceties of cocktails and all that they implied -- sociability, sophistication, status; of college days spent drinking beer and cheap wine; of her three failed marriages, in which alcohol was the inescapable component, of a way of life that brought her perilously close to the edge.