Note Found in a Bottle: My Life as a Drinker

Drinking gets discussed surprisingly little in this memoir, ''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, 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.