From the moment they met at a pub in London, booze was the most conspicuous part of the lives of Caitlin and Dylan Thomas. Drink fueled their sexual adventures, lessened their shyness, and enriched their social life. Without it they were lost. With it they were either "fiends or fools." Only when he wrote did Dylan stay sober. Recognized by many as the greatest poet of our age, he rose to immense fame, attracting great crowds to his readings , and flocks of women to his bed. Not one to enjoy being another's shadow, or playing the role of dutiful wife, Caitlin rebelled.

The searingly honest book is Caitlin's look at the toll those years of drink took on the lives of two talented, loving people, leaving one of them dead at the age of thirty-nine, and the other alone, penniless, and an alcoholic. Caitlin provides insights into Dylan and his writing, his success, his affairs, and his sweet nature. Equally honest with herself, she reveals her brawling, her infidelities, and her somewhat slipshod mothering of their three children. And she gives us our first glimpse of Caitlin's own childhood - a free and unstructured life with her two sisters in the woods and rivers of the English countryside, where they searched for birds' nests and rode horses. These early stories provide a striking contrast to the descent into hell that Dylan and Caitlin's marriage eventually became.

Double Drink Story was written years after that hell had been left behind and Caitlin had finally escaped her alcoholism. It was not an easy road to sobriety - Dylan's death plunged her into madness and an even greater dependence on the bottle. It took the love of another man, Giuseppe Fazio, and the birth of their son, Francesco, when Caitlin was 49, to give her a reason to stop drinking and provide her with the courage to write this book. The afterword by Francesco Fazio touchingly recounts their life together in Italy until Caitlin's death in 1994 at the age of 81.

Double Drink Story is a powerful portrait of two gifted individuals whose "solemn duty was to surfeit themselves limitlessly with drink, to wild extinction." It is also the memoir of a woman caught in the twin traps of alcoholism and thwarted ambition. Not always likable, but consistently energetic, painfully honest and sometimes tragic, Caitlin Thomas emerges as a woman of indomitable spirit.