Name: Drinking
ISBN: 9780385315548

Caroline Knapp

The author provides a candid memoir of her twenty-year love affair with alcohol, explaining how and why she became an alcoholic and her struggle to live without an alcoholic crutch

A Love Story

Drinking

Daniel Spruill

“But those of us who’ve experienced more gradual and insidious descents into alcoholism have to turn the disease concept over and over in our minds, to learn over long periods of time to believe and accept it.”

This book deeply resonated with me. Caroline describes alcoholism, and everything that comes with it, in such a visceral way that it felt like she was accessing a part of my own brain that’d been kept shut off.

I read this book over the course of nearly four months. Sometimes I’d stop out of fear, and sometimes I just didn’t want to think about how deeply similar our drinking lives were, but I am so glad I finished. Her story is saddening, especially knowing she passed away not long after getting sober, and I would’ve loved to have known her. She seemed like an incredible woman.

Amanda Autumn Berrey

Vivian

Fifteen million Americans a year are plagued with alcoholism. Five million of them are women. Many of them, like Caroline Knapp, started in their early teens and began to use alcohol as "liquid armor," a way to protect themselves against the difficult realities of life. In this extraordinarily candid and revealing memoir, Knapp offers important insights not only about alcoholism, but about life itself and how we learn to cope with it. It was love at first sight. The beads of moisture on a chilled bottle. The way the glasses clinked and the conversation flowed. Then it became obsession. The way she hid her bottles behind her lover's refrigerator. The way she slipped from the dinner table to the bathroom, from work to the bar. And then, like so many love stories, it fell apart. Drinking is Caroline Kapp's harrowing chronicle of her twenty-year love affair with alcohol. Caroline had her first drink at fourteen. She drank through her yeras at an Ivy League college, and through an award-winning career as an editor and columnist. Publicly she was a dutiful daughter, a sophisticated professional. Privately she was drinking herself into oblivion. This startlingly honest memoir lays bare the secrecy, family myths, and destructive relationships that go hand in hand with drinking. And it is, above all, a love story for our times—full of passion and heartbreak, betrayal and desire—a triumph over the pain and deception that mark an alcoholic life. Praise for Drinking “Quietly moving . . . Caroline Knapp dazzles us with her heady description of alcohol's allure and its devastating hold.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review “Filled with hard-won wisdom . . . [a] perceptive and revealing book.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Eloquent . . . a remarkable exercise in self-discovery.”—The New York Times “Drinking not only describes triumph; it is one.”—Newsweek

Mari-Claire Parrin

I'm reviewing this a few months after finishing the book, about to be 11 months sober.....
I was newly sober when I read this, and it was like Caroline Knapp could see inside my head at times. I lost count of the passages I sent to my sponsor that summed up how I felt.
An incredibly cathartic read for me.
A definite re read in another couple of months.

Drinking A Love Story

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