While in Vermont recently, I fell ill. Something was going around, and I got it. There was, as a local had said driving us into town a week earlier, one of everything where I would be staying, and I walked to the only grocery store to get drugs, feverish and wondering if someone had put a hex on me. Notoriously…

Hemingway in Cuba. John Cheever’s drunk swimmer. Carson McCullers’ gin and cigarettes diet. Writing and drinking have long intertwined in the cultural consciousness, often making legendary myths of artists with very real drinking problems. In her new critical memoir, The Recovering: Intoxication And Its Aftermath,…