Every so often in this thin book about “sex addiction,” the sea of psychotherapeutic gobbledygook parts and John Cheever, the author’s famous father, peeks through. He appears literally, mixing the young and heartsick Susan Cheever a gin and tonic as he nurses one of multiple daily Scotches (or later, in his belated sobriety, wanting to know how to operate a dishwasher, with a child’s enthusiasm). And he appears literarily, in brief but lyrical passages from Ms. Cheever about ice floes nudging one another on the East River, or the stubborn, sickly-sweet smell of the tacky 1970s cologne Canoe clinging to her sheets after one of her many one-night stands.

But this lyricism, this flash of serious talent, was not the elder Cheever’s primary legacy to his daughter. Rather, with his alcoholism and secret bisexuality—the Cheevers were no Cleavers, as we know from Susan’s 1984 memoir Home Before Dark—he bequeathed to her material, a lifetime’s worth of emotional problems to be worked through, over and over again. This she accomplishes with something that’s not so much writing as what New Age therapists like to call “journaling”—free-form, yet somehow dutiful and joyless.

DESIRE, WHOSE TITLE recalls one of those slickly packaged Josephine Hart novels popular in the last millennium, is Ms. Cheever’s fifth memoir, or at least partial-memoir, in six and a half decades—no small feat. She has knocked off a few novels herself, as well as a biography of Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson.

Ms. Cheever, who’s about the furthest thing from an anonymous alcoholic there is—see Note Found in a Bottle (1999)—now confesses that she withheld some pretty juicy stuff from her account of Bill Wilson’s career: Though married, he often arranged multiple daily liaisons with different ladies when traveling for work, resentful former colleagues told her. But did he have a clinical disorder or was he just a womanizing jerk? And was Ms. Cheever’s own frequent bed-hopping evidence of a diagnosable mental imbalance, or was she a voracious romantic adventuress with morning-after regrets? As a male friend pithily puts it: “Who the fuck isn’t a sex addict?”

The author palpates more than probes as she makes the rounds of experts, some of whom have done significant work connecting addiction and trauma. There’s a trip over cobblestoned streets to Harvard-educated physician Judith Herman. (“My father’s family comes from Boston,” Ms. Cheever can’t help but note, “and Harvard somehow epitomizes the social and economic levels we were unable to achieve.”) She brunches at Barney Greengrass (“S. J. Perelman wrote about it”) with addiction and recovery specialist and financial counselor Ron Gallen. She chats with anthropologist Helen Fisher, in her “pleasant apartment off Fifth Avenue.” She stands admiring Turner paintings at the Frick with the Yale fellow Maggie Scarf. One begins to wonder if in fact it is not sex Ms. Cheever is addicted to, but the experience of interviewing impressively credentialed individuals in gemütlich settings.

Also reading books—big books! Great Books! Hey, was Anna Karenina a sex addict? What about Emma Bovary? Humbert Humbert, surely. If all passionate behavior is pathologized and treated, will we have anything left to read, watch and listen to, or will the human race be condemned to an eternity of Tell Me You Love Me reruns on HBO?

MS. CHEEVER DESCRIBES romps with everyone from her mother’s oncologist to “moving men” to her “Rabelaisian” third husband, the editor Warren Hinckle, who used to loom over her typewriter suggesting cuts (“more intimate than sex,” she breathes). Details are mercifully left to the imagination, perhaps because she doesn’t remember them: One thing that apparently distinguishes an addict from your average person is that the addict enters a sort of “brownout” or fugue state while the sordid deed is done. (As the Church Lady used to say, how convenient. …)

These days, at any rate, life has quieted down for Ms. Cheever, according to a recent profile in The New York Times, though it’s unclear whether that’s because she overcame her sex addiction, or because she aged out of the game. “Like it or not, the most powerful woman is an 18-year-old woman,” she brayed to reporter Joyce Wadler—an assertion that would probably surprise and dismay most 18-year-old women, never mind the rest of us.

Lightly blending scientific surveys, statistics, literary analysis and snatches of memoir, Desire resembles a gelatin salad from the suburban table of Susan Cheever’s youth: transparent, wobbly, a bit fruity. What’s missing is commitment—not to a man, but to an idea.

Alexandra Jacobs is editor at large at The Observer. She can be reached at ajacobs@observer.com.

He demanded a drink on his deathbed. Yes, in the final days of his long, knotty life, after 36 years of hard-fought sobriety and public battle against the demon rum, the man behind AlcoholicsAnonymousdemandeda drink-several, actually, with increasing belligerence, even going so far as to threaten to punch the nose of the nurse who denied him. But whether you think this doozy of a detail puts the lie to Bill Wilson's mission or merely reinforces the tortured heroism of an all-too-human visionary could hinge on whether or not you've read Susan Cheever's sympathetic biography, My Name Is Bill.

Actually, "sympathetic" is putting it mildly; "hagiographic" is more like it. What we have here is the literary equivalent of laying gauze on the lens. Cue the violins: The elders of A.A. can rest safe that their founder has received the velveteen treatment.

Not that Ms. Cheever ducks the issue. She deserves credit for including this deathbed bombshell in the final six pages of her biography. But talk about burying the lead! Instead of spotlighting it, Ms. Cheever slips it in, almost in passing, as part of the roseate glow of closure. Where are the trumpets announcing this astonishing fact? Where is the rigorous re-examination such a revelation would seem to demand?

Ms. Cheever is brave enough to list other problematic stuff, too: "Bill loved LSD." "Bill was not the stuff of saints." "Bill was human, extraordinarily human." Bill was "sexually less than perfect." These are big statements, but in each case you have the feeling she's hard-pressed to admit to them, except in demure terms and coy language. She has a way of soft-soaping things, of finding excuses, of adumbrating rather than analyzing. That LSD detail, for instance. Can one drop acid and still claim sobriety? Can one proselytize for a hallucinogen-"Bill urged everyone he knew to try it"-and still claim to be on "The Path"? Instead of aggressively pursuing such questions, Ms. Cheever bends over backward to overcontextualize his behavior, if such a thing is possible. "In the early 1960s the substance called LSD was still mysterious as well as being completely legal," she writes, apparently unaware of how that "completely" threatens to erode her credibility. "Furthermore, it was used as a part of a series of experiments being conducted by great minds, men deeply committed to creating a society better than the one that was responsible for two world wars and a host of other horrors." Does this mean the choice was between committing genocide and tripping your ass off?

Through the course of the book, an apprehension grows that the author knows more than she says. Wilson's interest in the paranormal (including extensive use of an Ouija board set up in a designated "spook room"), his explosive breaks with friends and supporters, as well as the "adulation, sometimes expressed physically and erotically, [of] many women"-it's all there, but presented in soft focus. So much euphemistic language is employed in Wilson's defense (what exactly does it mean that "Personalities were sparked by Bill's outsized ego and intelligence, and he often sparked back"?) that the reader is finally forced to make a decision: Either you go along with the happy spin, or you try to take the measure of the man himself.

Fortunately, there's much to admire in My Name Is Bill. Ms. Cheever's descriptions of nature, both in Wilson's native Vermont (the land where, as his rascally dad used to say, it was "ten months of winter and two months of damned poor sledding") and in the bucolic New York hamlet to which he repaired for the final chapters of his life, approach the clear-eyed rapture of her father John's best nature writing. Indeed, with just one adjective-Wilson's tombstone is made of "sugary" Vermont marble-she lays claim to the Cheever magic.

Equally eloquent are her jitterbug descriptions of drink. "He never forgot the warmth of the tavern and the way the men there seemed to melt together into one person-a person immune to loneliness." Or again: "The sweet drink made of gin, dry and sweet vermouth, and orange juice shimmered in its glass … sweet and airy at the same time." After imbibing, "He stepped out into the driveway of the house, enthralled. Behind him he could hear soft saxophone music. As he walked down the drive through the fragrant summer night, he moved as easily as if invisible chains had fallen away."

So seductive are these pleasures that it's not long before Wilson starts to slide; and with a novelist's concision, the slide soon becomes literal. "By the end of the day," she writes, "he'd be so broke he had to slide under the [subway] turnstile to get back to Brooklyn." Ms. Cheever excels at weaving together the contradictions of this voluble, charismatic, depressive character-which lends to her tale a tinge of inevitability. ("For all his showmanship and flamboyance, Bill was horrified by people who waited for hours or traveled for miles just to be in his presence. He was abashed at becoming a celebrity.") The personal slide also happens to coincide with the slide of the stock market, so that, in her telling, Wilson's story becomes emblematic of a society's mythic fall from grace.

The standard debasements follow: collapsing at airports, bar fights with thugs, throwing sewing machines at his too-long-suffering wife, stealing change from the purse of same, secreting gin bottles in the overhead tanks of toilets, waking up with no memory in flea-bitten hotels. It's the classic cycle of binge drinking and concomitantly desperate remorse, including pathetic pledges written and rewritten in the family Bible. Sorry stuff, even with the gauze.

And then: epiphany. The miracle road of sobriety has been told often enough, in its many variations-no point in repeating the story here. But what's new are the surprising elements Ms. Cheever brings in to explain it: the temperance movement of Wilson's Vermont childhood and the cathartic effect of reading William James, including this line from Varieties of Religious Experience (1902): "Sobriety diminishes, discriminates and says no; drunkenness expands, unites and says yes." Reading that, Ms. Cheever claims, Wilson felt understood for perhaps the first time in his life.

There's understanding, and then there's understanding. Many questions arise: Can a biographer be said to have so much understanding that she overidentifies with her subject? From the opening chapter, can she exhibit so much compassion for young Bill Wilson, for the "raw, desperately hurting boy" and his "caul of despair," that her objectivity becomes clouded? Can she stay on a first-name basis, from the title on, without compromising her clarity? Is the biographer's function to plead her subject's case ("he was not a perfect man, but he was the perfect man for the job," his "humanness does not diminish him, it makes him a writer, guide, and teacher," etc.), or to let the unvarnished facts speak for themselves? When does discretion become a veil? Is there such a thing, in a biographer, as too much heart?

God knows, I'm not agitating for a cheesy tell-all. But it's hard to avoid the sense that Ms. Cheever's first allegiance is not to the reader but to the legend of Bill Wilson, Inc. Some parts of his life, including his sex life, are still officially secret, she duly notes. Says who? Anyone not under the sway of A.A. would plow ahead and bust those secrets-either that, or risk the charge that she not so much breaks the contract with the reader as never commits to it in the first place.

In all fairness, Ms. Cheever finds herself in a difficult position, caught between two irreconcilable tenets built into the fiber of A.A. itself. On the one hand, there is the rule to maintain all confidences, to not air dirty laundry and thereby betray the trust. On the other hand, and equally sacrosanct, is Bill Wilson's own iron-clad law that the "one requirement for sobriety was 'rigorous honesty.'" The only sure way to avoid being called an apologist is to subscribe to the latter.

Daniel Asa Rose, former arts and culture editor of Forward, is the author most recently of Hiding Places: A Father and His Sons Retrace Their Family's Escape from the Holocaust (Simon and Schuster).

It's not surprising the novelist Susan Cheever got entangled in the drinking habit very young. Her father was John Cheever, arguably the most accomplished short story writer America has produced, and certainly high on the list of its most accomplished drunkards.

By way of introducing us to a world in which the walls are streaked with shoe polish from guests falling down the stairs, a world in which visitors are frequently given a room to sleep off lunch until the following morning, Susan Cheever begins her memoir of drinking with a WASP cliché: the family martini recipe, which she learned from her grandmother at age 6. With braggadocio masquerading as contrition, she informs us that the key is to "just pass the [vermouth] bottle over the gin." Ms. Cheever is not unaware that this also happens to be the recipe for transforming the ruling class of the most powerful nation on earth into its lowest-earning white ethnic group. But Note Found in a Bottle is less about the milieu of Yankee alcoholism than how a woman from such a milieu makes her way in the world of love and career.

At the heart of this book are Ms. Cheever's three marriages–to Malcolm Cowley's son Robert, New Yorker art critic Calvin Tomkins and radical-chic editor Warren Hinckle. (The first two are given only first names, but a biography of John Cheever will help you fill in the blanks.) Ms. Cheever implies her first marriage was driven largely by a desire to please her father. In Palma de Mallorca, she and Robert set themselves up as "writers" and did little but drink. (When Robert, suffering intestinal pains, was advised to lay off drink for a few weeks, Susan buttonholed the doctor: "You don't mean wine too?") They fought, and occasionally came to blows. But booze was implicated more in unfulfilled potential than in any of the out-and-out wreckage we'd associate with "alcoholism." Back in the United States, their bookless, jobless lives looked much less glamorous. "With breathtaking speed, it seemed, we had gone from being a promising, talented young couple to a couple of has-beens," Ms. Cheever writes.

But not for long. Ms. Cheever caught on with Newsweek and was soon making a play for the much older Mr. Tomkins. While a lover of champagne, Mr. Tomkins was a doting family man and very much under control. Their marriage was a fruitful time for Ms. Cheever, who wrote her first novel ("The prose seemed to burn right on the page"), had her first child, and moved into Julia Child's house on the Côte d'Azur. Ms. Cheever also seemed to like the social set they traveled in, for here begins a marathon of literary- and art-world name-dropping that runs through Janet Maslin (Ms. Cheever's sister-in-law), John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm, Roger Angell, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Massie (with whom she has a fling) and Francis Ford Coppola (who tells her–she forgets why–"you're a good person").

Though Ms. Cheever doesn't say so, something other than booze is at the root of this marriage's collapse. The problem was that, once she had Mr. Tomkins in the bag, he ceased to interest her. All three of Ms. Cheever's husbands were married when she began dating them, and there is an exuberant sluttishness about her recounting of the times when she occasionally had three men in a day. "I didn't know," she lets drop darkly, "that promiscuity can be a symptom of clinical depression."

Ms. Cheever wanted adventure. She drifted back into an on-again, off-again relationship with Warren Hinckle, who, long past his glory days as editor of the leftist Ramparts , was living an alcohol-clouded existence in San Francisco. They married and had a son. Mr. Hinckle was wild, romantic and irresponsible. "He agreed," Ms. Cheever writes, "that we had a great love, that we weren't like other people, that our love transcended the silly lives led by most people we knew." It was perhaps because of the anarchy in his life that Ms. Cheever fell for him. She suspects that at some level it put her in mind of her father, since "every man I've been involved with has somehow been a shadow of his giant figure."

All the same, Mr. Hinckle's drinking began to alarm her, and she tried to arrange–without success–to check him into a detox center. In retrospect, she sees this as a projection of her own drinking problem.

"What alcohol does is hidden until the very end," says Ms. Cheever. If so, how convenient for her. Because when we reach the catastrophic moment all drunkards must face, when the carefree illusions of youthful tippling expire in vomit, deceit and dishonor … she changes the subject. We surface in the present: Ms. Cheever informs us that she has found contentment in her two children and God, and hasn't had a drink in five years.

It's not surprising that she doesn't want to share with us the gory details. But as long as she doesn't, she's asking us to commiserate over a life she's basically bragging about. She goes easy on herself, and yet she used to be tougher, as she was with her father, whom she posthumously outed in a 1984 memoir.

Ms. Cheever lets on that sometime in the past decade, she decided to leave behind "all those terrible things, those long, sexy afternoons and those betrayals." Unsurprisingly, she fails to offer much evidence of what's so terrible about "long, sexy afternoons." No–alcohol, as it appears in these pages, did some nifty things for Ms. Cheever, on top of the nifty things it does for normal drinkers. It helped her to play a distinctive role among unconventional and glamorous people. It still offers her a road into identity politics and victim-discourse that even a WASP can travel. Anyway, what would she set in the place of it? While Ms. Cheever claims to be riven with regret, she doesn't name a single decision she'd take back, or a single one of her famous friends she'd ditch. Or even a single husband: "It's true," she says, "that I have had three marriages that ended, but these days I don't remember them as failures." Booze may indeed have wrecked her life, but there's little evidence of it in this book.

Ms. Cheever cannot decide whether she wants to be judged as an adult or as a moral automaton. In fact, she wants it both ways. Credit as an adult for the saint I am; expiation as a moral automaton for the lousy things I do. In one bizarre episode from the waning days of her marriage to Mr. Tomkins, she ditches her 5-year-old daughter, who has come down with the chickenpox, to take off for Cuba with Warren Hinckle. Ms. Cheever explains it away through what sounds like a combination of recovery movement and recovered memory: "In my heart I was re-enacting a separation of mother and daughter that resonated from before I could remember." Ms. Cheever is using alcoholism to separate herself from her human failings: The love for my daughter is me; the blowing town to dance on the beach in Havana is my disease.

The fault for this moral muddle may lie in the way people quit drinking, especially in this country. Ms. Cheever is a convert to Alcoholics Anonymous, which holds that recovery from alcoholism is contingent on recognizing that one is "powerless over alcohol," and that one's body and mind are wired to send urges to drink in the most crafty and cunning ways. Obviously, the idea of powerlessness as promulgated by A.A. is not limited to booze. How can it be? If you are just a machine of addictive trickery, then every turn of your mind, every bit of your reason, is just a ruse to get you back on the bottle. Your love of Chinese food is just your alcohol addiction providing a pretext to get you to the Wang Hung Palace where the bartender knows you. Your hatred of the government is just projected "anger" that you can't drink as much as you want. Worst of all, any trust in your willpower, your intelligence, your maturity to get you out of this problem is "denial."

What's missing is the morality that's necessary if one is to draw any meaning out of drinking. This needn't be a sackcloth-and-ashes moralism; even the morality of André Gide in Corydon , in which he answered accusations of pederasty by recasting his vice as a virtue, would be welcome. (Heavy drinking is long overdue such a defense.) Without some such moral benchmark, Ms. Cheever's transformation looks like the opportunism of another American baby boomer who's gone from left-wing libertine to right-wing prude at–how convenient!–the very moment her own appetites begin to wane.