DRINKING: A LOVE STORY BY CAROLINE KNAPP

Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp



Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp

Summary of the book

Drinking: A Love Story is Knapp's revealing glance into her own psyche as an alcoholic. The book is well-written; Knapp was, after all, an award winning editor and columnist, but it is also poignant. Knapp's odyssey with alcohol began when she was just fourteen years old and went on for roughly twenty years. Knapp colorfully reveals the sense of longing she felt when she saw a shapely balloon glass full of red wine or the beads of moisture on a glass of white wine. She describes the many toxic relationships she had while she was drinking, with men and women who tended to drink with her. Her friends were drinking buddies-- as she tells it; they shared nothing in their friendships except the love of drink. Her boyfriends sought to change her or take advantage of her. Her family, particularly her mother and her twin sister, tried to save her. It took an accident that nearly cost the lives of the two young daughters of Knapp's oldest friend to get her to realize that she would eventually kill herself if she didn't end her affair with the bottle. (Knapp, 1996)

Drinking: A Love Story is the story of what led Knapp to the point of stopping drinking. Throughout the book, she reveals the crazy rationalizations that alcoholics employ to justify their drinking (see the title of this review). Knapp also writes about co-addictions that many alcoholics face.

She writes about her friends' co-addictions before she comes to her own. She spent years trading her addiction to alcohol for an addiction to dieting. In the fall of 1982, about a year after Knapp graduated from prestigious Brown University, she became anorexic, eventually getting down from 120 pounds to a low of 83 pounds. Knapp explains that the anorexia "had the feel of a cage" and that had made her feel safe. Knapp's mother had just been diagnosed with breast cancer over the summer of 1982 and had undergone a lumpectomy and radiation treatments. She was due to begin chemotherapy. While her mother suffered from cancer, Knapp lost seventeen pounds in six weeks and chopped off all of her hair. It was as if Knapp wanted to take away some of her mother's illness and when she couldn't do that, she did something that she could do... take on her mother's appearance. Ironically, Caroline Knapp was eventually a cancer patient herself. In April 2002, she was diagnosed with lung cancer and succumbed to the disease just two months later at the age of 42.

She also writes about her family relationships. Knapp's father, a psychoanalyst, also drank. He had been married before and had a troubled son named Wicky, who was much older than Knapp. Every time Wicky was around, the house was in turmoil. Of course, no one knew at the time, but Wicky displayed all of the classic signs of ...