Drinking - A Love Story



Drinking - A Love Story

Introduction

Drinking: A Love Story, is the powerful, truthful memoir of Caroline Knapp. In the novel, Knapp details her long, involved, and tortured love affair with alcohol. She describes the effect of alcohol on her relationships, emotions, and thoughts. The addictiveness of drink impaired her ability to grow emotionally and personally. Professionally, Knapp was smart, productive, and always willing to work. Personally, she was spiraling out of control from her drinking.

Discussion

Martha Stewart Herself couldn't have dreamed up a more handsomely appointed family than the Knapps of Cambridge, Mass. Dr. Knapp was an eminent psychiatrist, his wife was an artist and they lived with their three children in a big, airy house. The children had music lessons. The family spent their summers on Martha's Vineyard. And every night at 7, cocktails were served, followed by family dinner --"the white twelve-inch candles flickering in the center of the table, the silence punctuated by the periodic clatter of a knife or fork against a plate, the actual sound of people swallowing," (Knapp, 1996) as daughter Caroline Knapp describes the meal in her powerful memoir. Drinking: A Love Story. Over time Knapp began noticing something odd about her family's quiet, civilized dinners: when company came, there was never enough food. Money was not the problem; her parents seemed to lack an instinct for physical generosity. They never hugged, either, and Knapp grew up hungry for a great deal besides second helpings. She began drinking at 14, sneaking wine at home or getting drunk at parties. By the time she graduated from Brown, alcohol had become what she calls "a deeply ingrained way of coping with the world."

Caroline Knapp

Caroline Knapp didn't look like an alcoholic. At 34, she held down a plum job as lifestyle editor and columnist for a weekly newspaper, never missing a deadline. She kept her nails neatly manicured, her lunches light on fat, her muscles toned by killer workouts. But behind this polished exterior lurked a mass of insecurities that nothing could soothe except alcohol. So, she drank despite daily dry heaves and pounding hangovers, breaking every promise to cut back. She craved alcohol as if it were a faithless yet enthralling lover. As she says in her memoir, Drinking: A Love Story (Doubleday), booze had become "the single most important relationship in my life." (Knapp, 1996)

She writes that she drank to ease anxieties many of us have known at some point in our lives. When she felt cut off from other people, she'd drink for instant camaraderie. When she longed for intimacy but feared exposure, she'd opt for drunken sex. She found such comfort and constancy in alcohol that she ignored the downside "the way a woman hears coldness in a lover's voice and struggles, mightily and knowingly, to misread it." She slipped into an obsession with getting the next drink and concealing the last bender. When she finally realized she would have to stop drinking, she wept every night until she ...