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A review by sortabadass
Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp
3.0
This is one of those books that has been on my radar for a long time, so I'm glad that I finally found and read it. Actually, I didn't read it so much as tear through all 281 pages in a single evening when I should have been focused on homework instead. Given the subject matter, perhaps it's fitting that I consumed it in an uninterrupted weekend binge.
Drinking: A Love Story is a memoir of journalist Knapp's twenty-year relationship with alcohol. Much of the book will sound familiar to anyone who has read about addiction or has some background with Alcoholics Anonymous. Knapp's book avoided a pitfall that a lot of addiction recovery books fall into (in my opinion) by keeping the stories of her own life commonplace. She doesn't demonize her behavior and she doesn't demonize herself; rather, she highlights the contrast between high-octane drama and muddled haze that characterized the last segment of her drinking life.
Some chapters are better than others. I thought that the chapter on cross-additictions within the community of women drinkers was the best description of the subject I've seen. Knapp posits that almost every woman who has trouble with drinking also has what women tactfully call "an unhealthy relationship with food." She explores how these two impulses wage an unspoken war across the lives of women and, while she doesn't go any farther than that, just the recognition of the connection is worth reading. Her chapter on sex and alcohol is interesting and more than a little uncomfortable-making. Lastly, the overarching connection between Knapp's drinking and her relationship with her father is an excellent piece of self-examination in its own right.
Words Below
Vocabulary
Abstemious. (adj) Characterized by abstinence.
Quotes
Alcohol travels through families like water over a landscape, sometimes in torrents, sometimes in trickles, always shaping the ground it covers in inexorable ways.
Alcohol puts you in such a box, leaves you with such an impossible equation: you have to sexualize the relationship in order to feel powerful, and you have to drink in order to feel sexual, and on some level you understand it's all fake, that the power is chemical, that it doesn't come from within you.
Water seeks its own level; a lot of us seek out people who will drown us.
Drinking: A Love Story is a memoir of journalist Knapp's twenty-year relationship with alcohol. Much of the book will sound familiar to anyone who has read about addiction or has some background with Alcoholics Anonymous. Knapp's book avoided a pitfall that a lot of addiction recovery books fall into (in my opinion) by keeping the stories of her own life commonplace. She doesn't demonize her behavior and she doesn't demonize herself; rather, she highlights the contrast between high-octane drama and muddled haze that characterized the last segment of her drinking life.
Some chapters are better than others. I thought that the chapter on cross-additictions within the community of women drinkers was the best description of the subject I've seen. Knapp posits that almost every woman who has trouble with drinking also has what women tactfully call "an unhealthy relationship with food." She explores how these two impulses wage an unspoken war across the lives of women and, while she doesn't go any farther than that, just the recognition of the connection is worth reading. Her chapter on sex and alcohol is interesting and more than a little uncomfortable-making. Lastly, the overarching connection between Knapp's drinking and her relationship with her father is an excellent piece of self-examination in its own right.
Words Below
Spoiler
Vocabulary
Abstemious. (adj) Characterized by abstinence.
Quotes
Alcohol travels through families like water over a landscape, sometimes in torrents, sometimes in trickles, always shaping the ground it covers in inexorable ways.
Alcohol puts you in such a box, leaves you with such an impossible equation: you have to sexualize the relationship in order to feel powerful, and you have to drink in order to feel sexual, and on some level you understand it's all fake, that the power is chemical, that it doesn't come from within you.
Water seeks its own level; a lot of us seek out people who will drown us.