Drinking: A Love Story - Hardcover

Knapp, Caroline

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385315511 ISBN 13: 9780385315517

Publisher: The Dial Press, 1996

Synopsis

A powerful, brave, and moving memoir of one  woman's 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 Knapp's searing account of her twenty-year  love affair with alcohol, the "liquid armor"  she used to protect herself from life's 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.

About this title

Review:

The roots of alcoholism in the life of a brilliant daughter of an upper-class family are explored in this stylistic, literary memoir of drinking by a Massachusetts journalist. Caroline Knapp describes how the distorted world of her well-to-do parents pushed her toward anexoria and then alcoholism. Fittingly, it was literature that saved her: She found inspiration in Pete Hamill's A Drinking Life and sobered up. Her tale is spiced with the characters she's known along the way.

About the Author:

Caroline Knapp was a contributor at New Woman magazine and a regular columnist at The Boston Phoenix, and her work has appeared in Mademoiselle, The New York Times, and numerous international magazines. She is also the author of Alice K's Guide to Life and Pack of Two. Caroline Knapp died in 2002 at the age of 42.

About this edition

• Publisher: The Dial Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0385315511
• ISBN 13: 9780385315517
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 258