Note Found in a Bottle: My Life As a Drinker (1999)

Drinking gets discussed surprisingly little in Note Found in a Bottle: My Life As a Drinker. It's always there, sure — ''Sometimes I drank some wine during the day''; ''Robert mixed martinis in the parlor''; ''At my birthday dinner we drank a few bottles of champagne'' — but it's there on the page the same way traffic noises are there in a city: It's part of the scenery. Like most alcoholics, Susan Cheever never thought she had a problem because she was always able to function normally — she worked, wrote books, married, had children. Her story is a fascinating one, and she makes her points in understated, almost diffident prose, until the final chapter's AA-esque meditation on God. B+