Drinking: A Love Story: Case Study in Alcoholism

This paper is an examination of Caroline Knapp's Drinking: A Love Story, an account of her passionate love affair with alcohol and the events, thoughts, and realizations that eventually led her to renounce her "lover." The book is a brutally honest glimpse inside the mind of an alcoholic, as she battles the denials and rationalizations that lead her to seek solace in a bottle. Occasionally, she also has brief realizations that her drinking has become a problem, and she seeks out others whose alcoholism seems worse as a way of comforting herself. She examines her family background, especially the psychiatrist father whose own problems with drink and peculiar relationship with his daughter may have helped her use alcohol as a crutch. She also chronicles some of the effort and self-realization required for recovery from this addiction, but her primary focus is on the charm, seductiveness, and destructiveness that she was able to find in two decades as an alcoholic, hopelessly in love with liquor.

Knapp begins her story writing, "It happened this way: I fell in love and then, because the love was ruining everything I cared about, I had to fall out" (1). Throughout the book, she returns to the analogy of a misguided passion again and again. The parallels are interesting: alcohol began by making her feel good about life and herself. Eventually, however, it became an obsession, something that so preoccupied her that she was unable to focus on or care about anyone or any

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re are moments as an active alcoholic where you do know, where in a flash of clarity you grasp that alcohol is the central problem, a kind of liquid glue that gums up all the internal gears and keeps you stuck" (5). Such flashes pass quickly. They are painful to confront. She finds making vague promises to herself and those who care about her easier than actually keeping (or even remembering) those promises the next day. Knapp writes, "Trying to describe the process of becoming an alcoholic is like trying to describe air" (9). Sober now, contemplating her story through the cool eyes of a professional journalist, she still cannot pinpoint the moment at which she became an alcoholic, the moment at which a casual infatuation became a life's passion. She does, however, understand some of the forces that increased her lover's appeal, "that yearning for something, something outside the self that will provide relief and solace and well-being" (55). Many people seek that same something, and the places and forms in which they find it are diverse. Some, many of them women in modern society, find that relief, solace, and well-being in food or a career or a romantic partner. Knapp's story suggests that genuine contentment can only

Category: Medical - D