68 pages • 2 hours read
Caroline KnappDrinking: A Love Story
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1996A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 11-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary: “Giving Over”
Throughout this chapter, Knapp explores alcohol’s ability to delude the drinker. She notes how drinking can make a person feel powerful, as it is actually robbing him of his agency and control. She notes how drinking makes her friend, Elaine, blame others for her unhappiness, especially the married man she’s having an affair with. Knapp says alcohol damaged Elaine’s sense of control over both herself and the situation, and that it “made her see herself as a person who doesn’t have choices” (169).
In retrospect, Knapp realizes that Julian is her own version of Elaine’s married lover. He isn’t married, but Knapp’s relationship with him makes her feel devoid of control and choices. Julian is an art dealer Knapp describes as cerebral, urbane, and a connoisseur of the finer things in life. He seems like an improvement on previous boyfriends, even though he comes off as a jerk in the beginning. Knapp says Julian:
looked like a new solution to an old set of puzzles, a person who could help me learn to feed myself with pleasure instead of anxiety, who could teach me to merge the intellect I’d grown up with and the passion I’d felt lacking (171).
She later realizes that attaching so much hope to one person was a recipe for disaster. She expects him to change her life, which is too much to ask. Yet when they move in together, she feels as if she has “won the relationship version of a Nobel Prize” (171-72).
Knapp’s relationship with Julian begins to fall apart after a year. A turning point happens at Becca’s wedding, which dredges up feelings of competition and inferiority. Knapp says that at the time, she hated weddings, birth announcements, and similar proclamations because she sees them as “indications that all around me people were getting on with their lives while I seemed to stand still, immobile” (172). Other people’s success also makes Knapp jealous. “Traditionally, there were two routes to approval in my family: you went to medical school […] or you got married,” Knapp explains, noting that her sister did both within a week of each other, and that she even graduated from the same medical school that employed their father (172).
In addition to feeling jealous and stuck, Knapp feels stifled by the dress she has worn to the wedding. The dress is modeled after something Julian saw in a magazine and then insisted she wear. It is uncomfortable and makes her feel stupid, in part because she thought if the dress turned out the way she had hoped, she and Julian would be the couple tying the knot. Julian has strong opinions about the way Knapp should present herself, including how she should dress. When they’re about to move in together, he tells her she must do three things for him: purchase a new winter coat, highlight her hair, and never wear his clothes unless he’s decided they look good on her. As he tells her this, she realizes she’s wearing one of his old sweaters because she is cold. Julian tells Knapp that she’s not trying hard enough to maintain his interest and attraction. At first, this makes her angry, but she ultimately responds by apologizing to him and cleaning his apartment. Beyond feeling like a disappointment to Julian, Knapp fears him. They fight often, and always when Knapp is drunk. She attributes some of these fights to the brutality of his honesty. He would often tell her that he saw her as a fragile and insecure person, and that this weakness was a turnoff. She hates that he loves the person he wants and expects her to be, not the person she actually is at the moment. Knapp’s anger over this smolders when Julian chooses clothing for her, especially dresses that make her feel uncomfortable and exposed.
The summer after Becca’s wedding, Knapp learns that her mother’s cancer has returned after being in remission for five years. Knapp can’t believe the news; the risk of redeveloping a tumor is supposed to drop dramatically after this period of time. Though she knows her mother’s likely to die from the cancer, she buries herself in her relationship with Julian. Though her relationship with him is volatile and unhealthy, it gives her more sustenance than her relationship with her parents. Knapp explains that Julian provided shape and focus for her life, and that the dynamic of their relationship, troubled as it was, seemed preferable to the “veiled, shadowy unhappiness” that existed between her parents (182). In Julian, she had someone to obsess over, someone to please. She describes the shape of her addiction to both Julian and alcohol as circular, professing that “when you drink to drown out fear and rage, you quite literally dissociate from them, and you stop trusting yourself, stop trusting your own judgment and integrity” (182). Knapp convinces herself that Julian is the only person who truly knows her, that he knows her even better than she knows herself.
Chapter 12 Summary: “A Glimpse”
After the falling out with Julian, Knapp is desperate to stay in their apartment. She doesn’t want to leave him. She finally leaves a few days before turning 30 but chooses a new apartment half a block away, counting how many steps it takes to walk from her place to his.
Knapp’s awareness of her alcoholism is growing, in part because she realizes that alcohol is always involved when she and Julian fight. She books an emergency appointment with her therapist and tells him outright that she thinks she has a drinking problem. She delivers the news with little emotion but feels terrified inside. It’s the first time she has been this open about the problem. In the past, she has always skirted around the details of her drinking when talking with her therapist. She asks her therapist if she needs to quit drinking, and the therapist, who usually avoids answering with a direct yes or no, says yes.
Knapp also attends an AA meeting that evening. She expects to see others like herself there—young, professional women—but is surprised by the diversity in the crowd. She describes the atmosphere of the meeting as “gray and male and alien” and tells herself that she doesn’t belong there (190). Though she’s unsure if she’ll return to AA, she goes the whole night without drinking, a major feat. Knapp says this is the only night in the next five years that she abstains from alcohol—or from Julian.
Chapter 13 Summary: “Double Life II”
Though people often cite statistics when discussing the human costs of alcohol consumption, Knapp thinks it’s also important to talk about it on a personal level. She recalls a time Becca called her in tears, saying that she was afraid she was going to lose everyone she loves, including her sister. Becca worries that Knapp will get into a fatal car accident because of her drinking. Knapp says that at the time, she got defensive and waved away this concern, even though her sister was clearly distraught. She then notes that AA estimates that every alcoholic’s drinking affects at least four other people, making it very costly from a number of perspectives. The lies alcoholics tell are one of the ways they negatively impact on others.
Knapp explains how living a double life, one filled with lies and other types of deception, consumes an extraordinary amount of energy for the alcoholic. Inevitably, keeping up more than one persona will consume more and more time and energy. Plus, lying to others often leads to lying to oneself. Even lying about small things, like one’s opinion about a movie, seems benign, she says, “until you consider that people who drink constantly never really get a chance to know how they feel about anything” (194). Ultimately, many of these lies are the alcoholic’s way of overcompensating for the fact that the alcoholic hasn’t developed opinions about very many things. Knapp says these kinds of lies—and many others—coursed through her long relationships with two men, Julian and Michael.
Julian dominates and defines Knapp, to the extent that she feels she has no power:
I felt with Julian much the same way I’d felt with my father—slightly inferior, desperate for approval, convinced he held some key to my potential—and those feelings, so deeply familiar, kept me entrenched well beyond reason (201).
She turns to alcohol to dull these feelings and gets caught in a web of lies along the way. In particular, Knapp hides the truth to avoid facing consequences, especially when she begins seeing another man, Michael, as well. Knapp meets Michael a few months after moving out of Julian’s apartment, and he seems like the opposite of Julian: sweet, laid-back, and uncomplicated. He gives affection freely and asks for little in return. Plus, he is extraordinarily kind and has no idea how much she actually drinks. Michael and Julian both know that Knapp dates other people, but they have no idea how deep these relationships are for her because she misleads them. After a few months of seeing both men, Knapp becomes pregnant. She doesn’t tell either of them when she has an abortion, but she does stop sleeping with Julian, which relieves some of her guilt.
Knapp’s therapist asks her what might happen if she were honest with both men, and Knapp can’t bring herself to answer because she feels she doesn’t know how to tell the truth anymore. Deception has become a major part of her identity, something that makes her feel in control of difficult situations. Knapp says drama often comes with this kind of deception, and that it can be addictive as well. Knapp ramps up the deception when her father gets sick and she starts staying at Michael’s place more often. He becomes aware that she’s drinking too much, and she starts hiding liquor in his apartment. On one occasion, she gets locked out of his apartment while trying to access an alcohol stash on his porch. She’s supposed to be headed to Julian’s birthday party at the time, and she panics. As Knapp has increased the amount of deception in her life, she has also increased the drama. Instead of seeing the situation for what it is, she sinks into denial. She blames Julian for being incapable of loving her in the way she needs to be loved. She blames Michael for being too nice and for not demanding that she commit to their relationship. She doesn’t blame herself; in fact, she can’t admit that she plays a starring role in the drama she’s created. Knapp describes this as “living in a state of self-imposed chaos” (211).
Chapters 11-13 Analysis
Immobility—being stuck, standing sill, and other variations—is a theme in Chapters 11-13. Knapp notes how weddings and births used to make her feel stuck in one place because they remind her of how little progress she has made in her life. She also explains how her relationship with Julian gave her the sensation of having one self trapped inside of another self. Knapp says this felt like “carrying around a second version of myself, some tiny person who got angrier and angrier as time went on, but also smaller and smaller, too small to get out” (177).
Uncomfortable dresses also play an important role in this portion of the book. Knapp explains that the hideous pink dress from her sister’s wedding is actually the second-worst dress in the world. The worst, she says, is “a scrunchy black minidress made of Lycra that looked like a long tube sock when you held it up in front of you” (176). Like the pink dress, it’s something Julian told her she must have because it looks fantastic on her. In reality, it makes her feel miserable and exposed. She feels so exposed that she fears she would have collapsed onto the floor, sobbing from shame, if she hadn’t had so much to drink while wearing it. Julian doesn’t think she’s too exposed; the real problem, in his view, is her fashion sense. She should have worn different shoes with the dress. He tells her to consider his favorite looks from high-fashion magazines, which makes her feel belittled and insecure, as if her own clothing choices are inadequate. Knapp says she would signal to him that she needed guidance but then feel conflicted when he gave it to her.
Feeling belittled and insecure is par for the course with Julian. Knapp shares how Julian compared her to an expensive bottle of wine during a conversation with a couples’ therapist. As Knapp remembers it, he said, “You can appreciate all the qualities and all the nuances, but you’re just not sure you want to drink it every night” (173). This comment makes her furious, but she can’t pinpoint this feeling until years later. It’s one of many examples of how she bottles up her feelings until the metaphorical bottle is so full that it breaks. Knapp also recalls how she kept her ambivalence about Julian’s guidance to herself, rather than sharing it. This hearkens back to the way she withheld her ambivalence about her relationship with David during her senior year of college.
