Drinking: A Love Story
By Carolyn Knapp
Dell Publishing
Paperback 281 pp $11.95

In young romance, as with an alcoholic's first drink, anticipation is a major part of the encounter. Who can forget the glow, the belief that you've been transformed into someone worthy of notice?

Most people reserve this rapturous language to describe first love, but in Carolyn Knapp's book Drinking: A Love Story, she uses it to describe her romance -- indeed, her long and passionate affair -- with alcohol and her ultimate redemption through Alcoholics Anonymous. In this downward journey toward alcoholism, one that was so pleasurable at first and so treacherous later on, Knapp evokes two decades consumed by the comfort that drinking provides. Her story begins when she is a teenager in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and her first drinks are light, almost innocent. During dinners out with her emotionally detached psychoanalyst father, stilted moments become easier to endure when softened with a glass of wine. These are moments when drinking isn't an addiction, but a memory as golden as an old photograph.

Knapp asks the big question early on: How does a young woman from a well-to-do family, a magna cum laude graduate of Brown University, become an alcoholic? Alcoholism runs in families, but her twin sister Becca manages to avoid drinking, become a doctor, and stay happily married. Meanwhile, Knapp switches partners to avoid her pain, somehow keeping it all together. And this high level of functionality -- the ability to drink herself into a stupor night after night, then report for her job as a journalist again the next day -- is what makes her affair with alcohol both unique and tragic. "What happened?" she asks herself.

This is the book's most persistent and yet unanswered question: Knapp is better at cataloguing the extent of her drinking than at rooting out the reasons behind it. Readers may even wonder if she kept a drinking journal on her bedside along with the glass of chardonnay, since she is so aware of exactly what she was drinking decade by decade.

In her 20s, Knapp's after-dinner menu consists of two beers and a bottle of wine consumed at home by herself. If that wasn't enough, she would order another glass or two of Chianti at a nearby pizza parlor. By her 30th birthday, her consumption has expanded. It's not unusual for Knapp to pass the evening with eight glasses of wine and perhaps a shot or two of cognac at bedtime. When Knapp's mother dies of cancer, her grief drives her to drop her dead mother's hand to pick up a glass of wine on the nightstand.

Knapp doesn't linger long on this pain. She soon returns to her passion for drinking, the consummate eroticism that alcohol provides. Knapp supplies all too many adjectives for the bottle: silky, tart, even protective -- "it would feel like insurance." It's here, in her keen observation of the emotional seduction of drinking, that she is most successful, and as with any physical love, it's the sensations that draw her along. "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." And then later, the door to sex remains barred without alcohol to open it.

"When I was with men I loved, drinking felt like the most natural ally, the most reliable route to a kind of internal softening. A naturally inhibited person, someone who grew up feeling mystified and insecure about what it meant to feel sexual, I turned to liquor the way a dancer turns toward music: It felt central to the process, central to my ability to shut down the voices of self-criticism in my own head and simply let go, move to a different kind of music."

Unfortunately, drinking that becomes compulsive isn't very glamorous to look at for long. The toll that drinking takes is harsher on women's bodies than on men's. Many women alcoholics turn to drink to soften the pain of intimacy, then find the drinking deadens so much of their emotions that they are no longer capable of creating intimacy with a partner. "You remember sliding into sexuality in an almost instinctive way, mimicking what seemed like the appropriate behaviors: kissing him, holding onto him, throwing your head back in pleasure even though you didn't really feel pleasure, even though you didn't really feel much at all. And then your mind goes black." The drinking also makes women vulnerable to violence. It is no coincidence, Knapp points out, that women are all too vulnerable to being raped after drinking too much.

Readers who don't drink enough to have blackouts may find that Knapp's benders lose their sheen pretty quickly, especially after the first account. There are numerous tales about the quantities of alcohol she drank, where she bought the bottles, how she surreptitiously disposed of them without letting her lovers know. More than one sentence starts with "A woman named Elaine" or "A man named George," and some of these characters loop in and out of the narrative without attention to the chronology. These imperfections, however, provide more insight into the nature of alcohol addiction than anything. When the writing is cyclical, more dependent on descriptions of what's in Knapp's glass than on the people around her, it highlights her single-minded view of alcohol. To an alcoholic, the next drink is everything; the characters are peripheral. When the writing's good, however, it's dead-on and honest.

By her 30s, when Knapp decides to give up drinking, it is almost too late. Tiny blood vessels have burst on her face. On too many nights she has forgotten how she got home or where she has parked her car. A tremor has developed in her hands, and mornings are filled with dry heaves. She realizes at last that she will die or she will quit drinking, and she successfully opts for the latter before she hits bottom.

Unfortunately, some readers may find Knapp's journey to recovery less fascinating than her road to intoxication. Although her writing is still honest, it's not as sharp. When she finds joy in putting out her recycling bin without all those bottles in it, is the joy she expresses genuine or is this an attempt to enliven the dull nature of recovery? Anyone who's attempted to overcome an addiction, whether successful or not, knows that these links to sobriety are tenuous, so fragile that every day is a test of will. Knapp's ability to value these tiresomely small, overlooked matters are proof that her ties remain firm.

-- Psyche Pascual is a former staff writer for the Los Angeles Times. She is the articles editor for Consumer Health Interactive.

Last updated July 24, 2009
Copyright © 2001 Consumer Health Interactive

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