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 her friendships with men and in influencing her as a writer, Susan Cheever has written a memoir that is shocking and revealing. 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.