Susan Cheever - My Name Is Bill: Bill Wilson—His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous

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Praise for My Name Is Bill

If contradictory impulses and incongruous behaviors are what make us interesting, then Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was surely one of the most fascinating figures of the twentieth century.... Susan Cheever is lucky to have a character as intriguing as Wilson, and she clearly knows it. Cheevers fine new book, My Name Is Bill, is the antithesis of the psychological postmortem that too often passes for biography. Instead, Cheever gives us a wise, well-reported life story of the man who changed the way the world deals with addiction.... In effect, she lets her remarkable subject tell his own story.

Chicago Sun-Times

Susan Cheever has candidly written about what it means to be the child of an alcoholic ( Home Before Dark )... and her own dependency on booze ( Note Found in a Bottle ). She has recounted the heights of success (mostly others), recanted the depths of despair (her own and her ex-husbands) and now decants the ups and downs of a remarkable man who recovered from fifteen years of addiction to be a founder of Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935 and then to travel tirelessly to sustain its growth. Cheever does so in her distinctive style: succinct chapters, pithy profiles and telling detail.... In My Name Is Bill, truth is stranger than fiction.... Cheever is quite sound in identifying Wilsons sources of inspiration [and] acknowledges that Wilson was no saint.... A novelist and a journalist, she writes clearly; however, even more important are the insights and empathy so credibly her own as a reformed drinker who attended meetings of AA with her father, novelist John Cheever.

The New York Times Book Review

Susan Cheever draws on her skills as a writer and on her personal experience with alcohol to develop this story in a masterly fashion. The book is as much a biography of Bill Wilson as it is a collection of stories, which are skillfully stitched together in a roughly chronological order. The result is at the same time pleasant to read and a scholarly insight into the life of this celebrated person.... Cheever richly describes the personal struggle of this small-town Vermonter [and] lets the reader in on Wilsons struggle with depression and anxiety, an exploration of his interest in the occult and in the practice of communicating with the spirit world, and speculation about his sexual exploits. Each of these stories provides insight into the complexity of this modern hero. There are other biographies of Wilson, including an approved autobiography. But Cheevers storywhich is illustrated by photographs of the people, places, and things of his lifeis relatively unencumbered by a personal agenda. Moreover, Cheevers skill as a storyteller makes this an enjoyable reading experience.

New England Journal of Medicine

If only a novel, My Name Is Bill, in terms of memorable characters and poignant details, would be quite a success. As the biography of one of the most humane and beneficial Americans who ever lived, it is a national treasure.

Kurt Vonnegut

Susan Cheever has written a stunning and moving book about the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. It is deeply poetic and illuminates Bill Wilsons brilliance, his eccentricity, and his humanness in a way that brings the whole movement to life. I couldnt put it down. Anyone who is interested in Alcoholics Anonymous or in humanity should read this book!

Judy Collins

Bills name lives on.... My Name Is Bill, a new biography by Susan Cheever, is as much the story of the twelve steps and the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous as it is of the man who devoted much of his life to helping addicts.... Drawing on personal letters, Alcoholics Anonymous archives, interviews and visits to site mentioned in the book, Cheever balances her focus between Wilson and those who shaped his life.... thought-provoking.

Times Colonist (Victoria, BC)

As the child of an alcoholic father, author John Cheever, and an excessive drinker herself, Cheever brings authority on alcoholism as well as considerable skills as a researcher and writer to this unblinking biography of the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Booklist

F OR MY FATHER : 19121982

T he evening before Thanksgiving on November 25, 1895, Mrs. Emily Griffith Wilson, twenty-five years old, very confused and very pregnant, might have been found in the Wilson House hotel kitchen as the afternoon cold settled in outside and the steam formed on the windowpanes. She was preparing to bake an apple pie, cutting the apples and then rolling out the crust, and keeping an eye on the popcorn just warming up in a cast-iron pan over the woodstove. The big north-facing room where she worked smelled of cooking: of flour and the sweetness of apples, of a batch of sugar cookies and the sausage frying for the stuffing. Usually, she found these smells delicious, but this afternoon they were nauseating. Pregnancy ruined everything, she thought.

Emily could hear the others thumping around upstairs, Grandma Wilson and Gilly, and the rhythmic thunk, thunk of someone splitting wood in the big shed where the sheep and goats were penned in for the winter. Up the hill a dog barked. Out the back windows the kitchen garden, where a few pumpkins still lazed against the cold earth, was framed by the white columns of the porch, the big pine tree, and the road that followed Mad Tom Brook down to the peaked roof of the railroad station. She could hear the trains going through three times each daythe Green Mountain Flyer and the midnight sleeper when she was up late. The track came down from Montreal, past Dorset Pond just a few miles north, then right past the general store and the cheese factory, and then down the valley toward Manchester Depot and Manchester Village on the way to Albany, where you could change for Boston or New York City. Grover Cleveland was president, New York City police had just cracked down on an illicit distillery, and Oscar Hammerstein was packing them in at his Olympia Theater.

Across the green, as night fell and the pains made it harder for her to stay and work at the kitchen table, Emily could just see the parsonage where she and Gilly were planning to live once the baby was born. Then the lights went on in her parents little white house with the cheerful red door and the green shutters. They would be over for dinner tomorrow, but the thought of them at prayer in the cozy little parlor where she had grown up made the pains subside for a moment. Not that their life had been perfectlife was always hardbut right now, alone for a moment, she remembered the innocent girl she had once been. Things had seemed so simple then. Slow-moving oxen pulled the great blocks of marble out of the mountains and loaded them onto railroad cars. There was maple sugaring in the spring and apple picking and cider in the fall. There was the General Store, where Mr. Barrows always smiled at her; the town meetings over in Dorset Village; the Grange Hall, where men argued about politics; the blacksmith shop where the family horses got new shoes; and the cobbler where she went for her own new shoes.