''Clearly my job henceforth was to Let Go and Let God. Alcoholics Anonymous was safe - even from me.''

Bill's Wilsons Yankee temperament, lanky body, great gifts as a storyteller and childhood setbacks. 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 A.A. with her father, the novelist John Cheever. As she remarked in ''Note Found in a Bottle,'' his drinking ''wasn't hidden, it was completely visible. Because it was completely visible, the drinking was a secret that we kept from ourselves.''What she has related about her own religious sensibility coincides with what she has written about Wilson's. Belief in God became important to both of them, ''but it is intensely private and truly beyond my ability to describe. I don't understand God; I just believe in God.'' When Wilson handed over the leadership of A.A. at the St. Louis national convention in 1955, having provided the program with an enduring structure, he proclaimed: ''Clearly my job henceforth was to Let Go and Let God. Alcoholics Anonymous was safe - even from me.''