Synopsis
Caroline Knapp is a successful, Ivy League educated, award-winning columnist and editor--and an alcoholic. In this book, she reconciles her childhood experiences and her self-image as a powerful and capable professional with the inescapable fact of her alcoholism, and the eventual sobriety that AA meetings have finally granted her.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1996-06-01 |
| Size | | Length: | 258 pages | | Height: | 9.0 in | | Width: | 6.0 in | | Thickness: | 1.2 in | | Weight: | 14.4 oz |
Publisher's Note
"It happened this way: I fell in love and then, because the love was ruining everything I cared about, I had to fall out". So begins Drinking: A Love Story, journalist Caroline Knapp's brave and powerful memoir of her twenty years as a functioning alcoholic. Knapp writes that she loved liquor the way she loved bad men and, like all tragic love stories, hers is a tale of seduction and betrayal, a testament to the alluring but ultimately destructive powers of addiction. Fifteen million Americans a year are afflicted with the disease of alcoholism. Five million of them are women. Caroline Knapp, for example, started drinking at age fourteen. She drank through her years at an Ivy League college, through an award-winning career as a lifestyle editor and columnist. Publicly she was a dutiful daughter, attentive friend, sophisticated professional. Privately she was drinking herself into oblivion, trapped in love relationships that continued to undermine her self-esteem - until a series of personal crises forced her to confront and ultimately break free of the "liquid armor" she'd used to shield herself from the complicated battles of growing up. Caroline Knapp's ruthless self-examination, moral courage, and singular ability as a writer inform this remarkable memoir with many new insights about alcoholism, but more important, with many profound insights about life.
A powerful, brave, and moving memoir of one womans 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 Knapps searing account of her twenty-year love affair with alcohol, the "liquid armor" she used to protect herself from lifes 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.
Industry Reviews
"This remarkable book is far more than an addiction-and-recovery tale. Knapp doesn't see herself as a victim, and she refuses to blame anyone else for her problems....She is a rare writer, with a sophisticated, beautifully controlled style. 'Drinking' not only describes a triumph; it is one."
Newsweek - Laura Shapiro (05/20/1996)
"Her straightforward, lyrical, utterly unself-pitying memoir is testimony to the fact that alcoholism is a democratic disease..."
Boston Book Review - Kate Tuttle
"...a soul-baring memoir with cogent insights into the nightmarish world of addiction."
Kiberd
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