Drinking: A Love Story

In this extraordinarily candid and revealing memoir of her twenty years as a functioning alcoholic, Caroline Knapp offers important insights not only about alcoholism, but about life itself and how we learn to cope with it. Presents just enough science and provides a wrenching inner look at what this disease and the recovery from it feels like.--San Francisco Chronicle. nFifteen 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. nIt 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. n nCaroline 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. n nPraise for Drinking n nQuietly moving . . . Caroline Knapp dazzles us with her heady description of alcohol's allure and its devastating hold.--Los Angeles Times Book Review n nFilled with hard-won wisdom . . . [a] perceptive and revealing book.--San Francisco Chronicle n nEloquent . . . a remarkable exercise in self-discovery.--The New York Times n nDrinking not only describes triumph; it is one.--Newsweekn