Drinking: A Love Story
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Product Description
Fifteen million Americans a year are plagued with alcoholism. Five million of them are women. Many of them, like Caroline Knapp, ongoing in their early teens and started to use alcohol as “liquid armor,” a way to protect themselves against the hard realities of life. In this extraordinarily candid and revealing memoir, Knapp offers vital insights not only about alcoholism, but about life itself and how we learn to cope with it.Amazon.com Review
The roots of alcoholism in the life of a brilliant daughter of an upper-class family tree 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 establish inspiration in Pete Hamill’s A Drinking Life and sobered up. Her tale is spiced with the characters she’s known along the way.
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. . . sorry to say the leader rumor has it that only learned the first one. Sure, she’s an “A”lcoholic, but AA really works because of the second “A.” It’s an “A”nonymous program that has a public relations policy that is based on attraction rather than promotion; one that places principles before personalities. It also requires personal anonymity “at the level of press, radio, and films.” If she’s supposed to be so smart, why didn’t Caroline K know the Traditions of AA?
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
My guess is this woman wanted to write a book about her alcoholism. But her publisher said (just as mine did when I tried to write a memoir about my heroin addiction) “No, no, no. People do not buy books about women who have drug or alcohol problems. It is not considered masochistic or self-effacing enough. Everyone knows drunks and junkies like to have fun, and people only like reading about women when they torture themselves.” So Caroline Knapp chose to compromise–chat about the tiresome travails of anorexia (“It’s about control!” “I looked at all the women, particularly this one 120 pound, 5 foot 7 woman, and thought about how stout she was.”, etc. etc.) and the far more appealing tale of her alcoholism. In my own research (both literary and personal; including many, many talks with fellow female addicts), we have a WAY lower rate of eating disorders than the non-addict female population. Part of what makes addiction such a tough snare to crawl out of is that the addict likes to feel excellent even as her life is falling down in the process. So she drinks or does heroin to avoid DTs or withdrawal. If she was that concerned with how much she melds with society’s image of the perfect female (with which anorexics are obsessed), she WOULD NOT drink or drug, because using one’s body for pleasure, not pain, is considered a male not a female activity in our society. Therefore, I am left only with two options: Is Knapp a sham drunk or yet another female addict who was rendered invisible by a society that refuses to admit that women like escaping into the world of drink and drugs as much as men?
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
This book is for women who delight in reading about relationships, in repetitive, excruciating, detail. Her mother, father, sisters, girlfriends, boyfriends, etc. etc. and her drinking. Guys will find this hard to keep open.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
Is this your average alcoholic? An incredible background with that blind menacing half-wit brother who tried to kill her as a baby, her father’s first alkie wife howling in the background, her apathetic father, and a twin sister! No mention of whether she was an identical twin or fraternal. and that habit she had until she was 16 of getting down on all fours and rocking for hours in her room. I reflect Caroline was probably schizophrenic. People do like to imagine all alcoholics are like her. Was Pete Hamill just a better writer or was this woman nuts from the git go?
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
It is hard to judge that an auto-biography about an alcoholic can be dull. But alas, Ms. knapp has done just that. There are no fun or embarrassing tales on her expense. She just analyzes the hell out of her over priveleged childhood and constantly refers to herself as professional and pretty. Rumor has it that we are supposed to be shocked because she drank too many cognacs at some snobby social party. This woman isn’t an alcoholic, she is an amateur writer yearning to join the ranks of Hemingway. She constantly romanticizes about his hardships and alcohol induced anguish. I suppose her previous auto-biography (I kid you not) about her battle with anorexia didn’t get her enough attention. I marvel what the next disease- of- the- week she will suffer from and write a book about? Guys beware, this has female liberation all over it. Ms. knapp writes about getting plowed with booze and going home with a weirder, and blaming it on him the next morning , because she was taken advantage of because she was so drunk and he should have known better. She then follows that up with a date rape chapter. This book did make excellent firewood though.
1 star.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5