The Trip to Echo Spring

At some point, you have to set down the past. At some point, you have to accept that everyone was doing their best. At some point, you have to gather yourself up, and go onward into your life.

You could go two ways from there. You could keep on marinating in blame, in helpless submission to your circumstance. Or you could stop, just clean stop, and take up the liberating burden of responsibility for yourself.

they’d even met, he recommended him to his own editor at Scribner, Max Perkins, suggesting Max sign up this promising young

People don't like to talk about alcohol. They don't like to think about it, except in the most superficial of ways. They don't like to examine the damage it does and I don't blame them. I don't like it either. I know that desire for denial with every bone in my body: clavicle, sternum, femur and phalanx.

(‘we can take your liver out and give it to the Princeton Museum, your heart to the Plaza Hotel’).

Physically, Echo Spring is nothing more than a nickname for a liquor cabinet, drawn from the brand of bourbon it contains.

As long as Frank was well, I was happy,’ he wrote in Memoirs. ‘He had a gift for creating a life and, when he ceased to be alive, I couldn’t create a life for myself.’ And in a letter, written to Windham early in 1964: ‘next to my work, Frankie was my life.