Note Found in a Bottle [Paperback]

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 Bottleoffers a startlingly intimate portrait of the alcoholic's life -- and of the corageous journey to recovery.Susan Cheeveris the bestselling author of thirteen previous books, including five novels and the memoirsNote Found in a BottleandHome Before Dark.Her work has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won theBoston GlobeWinship Medal. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the Corporation of Yaddo, and a member of the Author's Guild Council. She teaches in the Bennington College M.F.A. program. She lives in New York City with her family.Chapter 1: Drinking with Daddy

My grandmother Cheever taught me how to embroider, how to say the Lord's Prayer, and how to make a perfect dry martini. She showed me how to tilt the gin bottle into the tumbler with the ice, strain the iced liquid into the long-stemmed martini glass, and add the vermouth. Just pass the bottle over the gin, she explained in the genteel Yankee voice that had made her gift shop such a success that she was lc±