Drinking: A Love Story | 
 enlarge | Author: Caroline Knapp
Publisher: The Dial Press
Category: Book
List Price: $22.95
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Rating:  154 reviews
Sales Rank: 270542
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 258
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.7 x 0.9
ISBN: 0385315511
Dewey Decimal Number: 362.292092
EAN: 9780385315517
ASIN: 0385315511
Publication Date: May 2, 1996
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: aged pages, worn cover/binding
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Amazon.com Review
The roots of alcoholism in the life of a brilliant daughter of an upper-class family are explored in this stylistic, literary memoir of drinking by a Massachusetts journalist. Caroline Knapp describes how the distorted world of her well-to-do parents pushed her toward anexoria and then alcoholism. Fittingly, it was literature that saved her: She found inspiration in Pete Hamill's A Drinking Life and sobered up. Her tale is spiced with the characters she's known along the way.
Product Description
A powerful, brave, and moving memoir of one woman's struggle with alcoholism, a disease that affects fifteen million Americans each year.
"It happened this way: I fell in love and then, because love was destroying everything I cared about, I had to fall out." So begins Caroline Knapp's searing account of her twenty-year love affair with alcohol, the "liquid armor" she used to protect herself from life's painful realities: family tension, social insecurity, fear of intimacy, her parents' deaths. Though she was for twenty years a functioning alcoholic, few would have suspected that beneath her attractive, Ivy League veneer, this successful professional was a young woman who had to drink herself to sleep every night. She thought alcohol gave her the courage to face life. It took her twenty years to admit that drinking only made it more difficult to bear.
Written with warmth, candor, and wisdom, here is one woman's story of addiction and recovery--a story that begins in despair and loneliness, but ends with the hope that within each of us lies the strength to survive in the world without anesthesia.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 149 more reviews...
 Yes..Yes..Yes!!!! October 22, 2008
JMJchria (PA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I found this book after suspecting I was on the road to Alcoholism.
After reading this book in one sitting I know I'm not on the road but am already and alcoholic. This is an incredible look at the process of alcoholism. How it takes over your mind and body and how such intelligent people get pulled in. If you are thinking you might have a problem or know someone who does read this book...It's incredible!!!
 Wonderful. August 27, 2008
Carlene Mayson (Seattle, WA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
After reading this book, I googled Caroline Knapp only to discover, to my great disappointment, that she died recently of lung cancer at the youthful age of 42. So sad. Drinking is fantastic. She cleverly weaves through her life as a privileged young adult to parents of means and into the life of an alcoholic. Most impressive is Knapp's ability to weave personal stories out of chronological order and placed more precisely according to her path toward recovering, alongside factual information about alcohol abuse in general. She holds herself no victim and accepts personal accountability while also endearing the reader to sympathize very well. I think I drink too much wine now.
Compelling August 26, 2008
Karie Hoskins (Everett, WA USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
"Drinking: A Love Story" - even the title is compelling. And the first line - "It happened this way: I fell in love and then, because the love was ruining everything I cared about, I had to fall out." And the love to which she is referring is, of course, with alcohol.
And she's right...although I never thought about alcoholism that way before. There are many similarities between this love and the love for someone who seems perfect at first but turns out to be life changing in the most destructive ways.
"I loved the way drink made me feel, and I loved its special power of deflection; its ability to shift my focus away from my own awareness of self and onto something else, something less painful than my own feeling. I loved the sounds of drink: the slide of a cork as it eased out of a wine bottle, the distinct glug-glug of booze pouring into a glass, the clatter of ice cubes in a tumbler. I loved the rituals, the camaraderie of drinking with others, the warming, melting feelings of ease and courage it gave me."
Seductive, isn't it?
Caroline Knapp is painfully honest as she tells her story, seemingly holding nothing back as she tells the reader about her theories on her own alcoholism, about the factors in her life, physical, emotional and circumstantial that may have contributed to this deadly love. While I am very fortunate to not share that love, I sympathized with her many times as she described her life.
"Growing up, I never heard my parents say "I love you," not to us and not to each other. I never heard them fight either. That's something else."
I must have read that line a dozen times in disbelief. While she never describes any physical abuse, the idea that a child grows up not hearing "I love you" several times a day from their parent just breaks my heart.
I once worked with a man who was a recovering alcoholic, and I remember him asking me if I was able to have just one drink at a sitting. I told him I was, that sometimes that drink would go unfinished. He shook his head and told me that he couldn't imagine taking a first sip of a drink and then not ending up blacking out at the end of an evening. So this section resonated with me.
"My mother didn't drink that way. Neither did my sister. They'd have a glass of wine at dinner - a single glass - and if you tried to pour more, they'd cover the glass with a hand and say, "No, thanks. I've had enough". Enough? That's a foreign word to an alcoholic, absolutely unknown. There is never enough, no such thing."
That thought is chilling to me - that once the drinking starts - it never stops.
The description of the elaborate planning that goes into being a "high functioning alcoholic" (as Knapp describes herself) seemed exhausting to me. Visiting different liquor stores each day, making up parties and events to explain the volume of the purchases, hiding booze in closets and plants. Though much of Knapp's story comes through in the carefully strengthening voice of someone who has lived through a nightmare and is carefully rebuilding, sometimes she is able to look at her past life with humor.
"Recycling is a problem to the active alcoholic: you have to see all those bottles, heaped together in the recycling bin, and that can be a disconcerting image. Luckily, I did most of my solitary, alcoholic drinking in communities that didn't then recycle, so I'd pile the bottles into a heavy plastic garbage bag and lug them out to the curb or heave them into a Dumpster, hoping no one nearby heard all the glass clinking and rattling as I went along."
Caroline Knapp's story is a compelling one, a look at the destruction that the love of drink can have on a life, on several lives as she talks to people she meets in AA, on a country as she gives chilling statistics and facts. And it's a story that doesn't have a happy ending.
As the book comes to a close, she is still sober, but she is the first to admit that the odds are against her and that it is a daily, hourly fight to stay that way.
"I once heard a woman say that as an alcoholic, a part of her will always be deeply attracted to alcohol, which seemed a very simple way of putting it, and very true. The attraction - the pull, the hunger, the yearning - doesn't die when you say goodbye to the drink, any more than the pull toward a bad lover dies when you finally walk out the door."
Because, of course, while closed, that door is still there, and can be opened once again.
Wonderful Insights, no rearranging that fact July 15, 2008
Elizabeth A (in the country in Michigan)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
What a fantastic book. Not just about alcoholism but the human struggle to live in our own skin, face our problems, our losses and move forward. Also a moving story about an amazingly honest woman. I'm not an alcoholic, but I use the stuff many times to not deal with things, and this book helped me to see that there is something more noble in steering clear of that kind of behavior and seeking more authentic experience. She's done a wonderful job of letting us in on her struggle, and somehow illuminating our own. I was terribly sad to find out that she had passed away some years ago, but she certainly left behind a great gift of inspiration. Her father's quote is a wonderful gem: "Insight is almost always a rearrangement of fact." Her insights bear this out. I wish I had the guts to buy this book for all my girlfriends.
beautifully written - gets better each time I read it July 13, 2008
jjchen (new york city)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I loved this book. I reread it every once in a while because it's so intelligent and beautifully written. It gets a alot of attention as a memoir of addiction (and it's the best one I've ever read), but it stand on it's own as an exquisite piece of writing and a memoir - time spent with a brilliant and nuanced mind, a sophisticated and sensitive person. I wish wish wish I could spend more.
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