AN ALCOHOLIC IN THE FAMILY

For close to twenty years Mrs. Burton, a British housewife, struggled with the fact that her husband was an alcoholic and with her own acceptance of that fact. This is her account of those years written with an undistinguished everydayness but bonafide intimacy which makes it all go down as easily as that next drink even if it's as quickly forgotten as the last. John's nightly drinking (usually in pubs), his debts, his sexual indifference to her and occasional adulteries, their quarrels, her ""blubbing"" and the erosion of her life (plus the impact on their four boys) but not her love for him -- plus the efforts made by hospitals, by AA and Al-Anon form the substance of the book which proceeds honestly from day to faltering day. It has a possibly supportive value for others; it has a certain curiosity-cum-compassion value; it is also not very different from comparable domestic chronologies of the bout with the bottle -- most recently Barbara Mahoney's A Sensitive Passionate Man (p. 89).