The wary reader, overdosed these many years on both Hemingway lore and mystical guff about fishing, and weary, in addition, of all too believable accounts of alcoholic decline, might tune in to Championship Bowling and leave Lorian Hemingway's memoir on the nightstand. Fair enough, but Walk on Water (Simon and Schuster; 250 pages; $23), though it does deal with booze and fishing addictions (the first deadly, the second a kind of soul's balancing act, said to be curative), is chiefly the record of a writer growing up and learning her trade.
She learned. And grew up, calamitously and against long...