Drinking: A Love Story

Knapp begins this chapter by relating a story about waking up next to a man she can’t remember meeting during a night of drinking—at least she can’t remember him at first. Huge chunks of that evening are missing from her memory. She knows they had sex, but it seemed surreal. She wonders how much this man remembers about that night, and what sorts of things she might have told him. She also dreads climbing out of his bed. Knapp notes that she never went out with men who didn’t like to get drunk, and that drinking was as important to her sexuality as a body part. Alcohol helps her say yes to sexual advances she’d probably reject otherwise and gives her the power to please. It also has a way of “making things bearable,” especially sexual activities she doesn’t like or want, because it keeps her from feeling very much (85). She says alcohol can drain away a range of negative emotions, from frustration and fear to shame and self-loathing. At the same time, being drunk turns “no” into “an extraordinarily complicated word” (80).

In a brief discussion of The Morning After, Katie Roiphe’s book about date rape, Knapp laments how the author treated alcohol as an accessory to the problem rather than a central feature. Knapp says alcohol is often singled out for impairing people’s judgment in sexual situations, but that its effects are much broader and deeper, especially in the realm of sexuality. She says women turn to alcohol “to deaden a wide range of conflicted feelings—longing for intimacy and terror of it; a wish to merge with others and a fear of being consumed; profound uncertainty about how and when to maintain boundaries and how and when to let them down” (80).

She notes how a friend named Meg used drinking to disparage and dismiss some of her most complicated feelings. Meg also didn’t know she could say no to men’s advances, and she didn’t know how to have sex without getting drunk. This combination often landed her in beds she never intended to visit, feeling shame, confusion, and regret afterwards. Knapp remembers how some drunken flirting in college led to some sex that she wasn’t expecting—and that she might not have consented to. In high school, she blacked out from drinking at her prom and had no idea if she had engaged in sexual activities with the boy she spent most of the night with in a car. The only thing that was certain was that she’d lost a shoe. This type of experience is extremely common, she says, citing statistics from two large studies of drinking and sexual activity among college students. One of these studies, completed at Columbia University, found that alcohol plays a role in nine out of ten rapes on college campuses.

Knapp then reflects on how alcohol shaped her relationship with her first love, David. Though she was not aware of it at the time, his steady supply of alcohol was probably one of the things she found most appealing about him: “It was always there, liquor was, helping us to blur the boundaries and deaden the fear, helping us protect ourselves from one another” (88). During college, when she dated David, drinking went from being “a simple tool of self-transformation—a way to relax and feel less inhibited, a way to be more sexual and open and light” to being “something more complicated, a more deeply ingrained way of coping with the world” (88-89).She loved the ways David was different from her family—not complicated, not intellectual, and very willing to shower her in hugs—but she worried that liking these qualities reflected poorly on her. When he moved to Rhode Island—and into Knapp’s apartment—during her senior year of college, she separated her life at Brown from her life with him, which harmed both herself and the relationship. She isn’t surprised that she made this choice, though. Of both herself and other alcoholics, Knapp says:

We become so accustomed to transforming ourselves into new and improved versions of ourselves that we lose the core version, the version we were born with, the version that might learn to connect with others in a meaningful way (89).

Alcohol is a way of dealing with the discomfort that closeness can bring and preventing oneself from ever learning to manage this closeness.

Knapp’s decision to keep David separate from her school life created an opening for other problems to creep in. Knapp craved the sense of validation she received from pleasing others, especially in the form of academic achievement, so she set out to impress the head of her academic program, a man named Roger. When they got drunk at a celebratory lunch, she didn’t protest when he kissed and groped her, even though this behavior scared her. They continue to get drunk together in the weeks that follow, and he continues to make sexual advances. One day, he tells her that he wants to be her lover once her boyfriend moves away. Though David is going to move away at the end of the summer, Knapp doesn’t want to be Roger’s lover. The idea makes her nauseous, and she feels victimized by his actions. She realizes she allowed him to pursue her because it made her feel as if she’d succeeded at something: she had pleased him and gained his approval, and his adoration was proof. But drinking complicated matters. When she drank with Roger, the alcohol made her feel sexy and powerful, even though she didn’t want a sexual relationship with him. It numbed her feelings and blunted her ability to be honest and brave. As she and Roger continued this pattern of drinking and groping, she didn’t tell David what was going on. This secret makes her feel powerless and stressed out, and it makes her dwell on her ambivalence about her relationships. Meanwhile, Knapp has never turned a critical eye toward her own shortcomings, such as her constant desire to have others validate and define her.

This discussion of secrets leads Knapp to explore how her father’s secrets shaped her life and that of her mother. The summer after her senior year of college, her mother called with some shocking news: she was thinking of leaving Knapp’s father. Knapp can’t recall a single incident that would have led to this decision; her parents always seemed relatively problem-free. The silence in their relationship seemed to signal success. Knapp’s mother reveals that her father has been having an affair for years. Though this surprises Knapp, it makes her dad seem less mysterious. He was distant and preoccupied because he was living a double life. She also learns that his own father had many affairs and humiliated his wife by discussing them in public. In retaliation, she would act seductive with anyone nearby, including her son, Knapp’s father. She concludes that “to identify with his mother was to yield to her seduction; to identify with his father was to condone his sadism” (99). So when he embarked on his own affair, he wouldn’t let it become public knowledge and humiliate his wife. Instead, he buried it in secrecy. Knapp also learns from her twin sister, Becca, that her father drank constantly while living with their mother. Alcohol, Knapp says, was “the medication for sexual conflict” (100). And the more he drank, the more he felt stuck, both in the secrets and the other relationship. When Knapp realizes that her life has taken on a similar pattern, she finds the courage to end her dalliance with Roger. But this does not save her relationship with David.

After the tumultuous year described in Chapter 6, David moves away and Knapp begins drinking alone for the first time. Becca also starts to worry about Knapp’s drinking after noticing how she nearly emptied a huge jug of wine Becca keeps in the fridge. Knapp vows to hide her alcohol consumption better from then on. She hides what she drinks, when she drinks, and how much she drinks from friends, family, and strangers alike. Knapp says coming up with elaborate schemes to hide one’s drinking is very common among alcoholics and shares examples her AA friends shared about how they kept clerks at the liquor store from becoming suspicious.

As Knapp begins to spend more time alone with alcohol, it becomes a constant companion, much like a lover. She also calls it a special kind of security blanket that keeps her from getting lost in her head. Developing this kind of relationship with drinking is part of the road to full-blown alcoholism, she explains, noting that alcoholic drinking:

is by nature solitary drinking, drinking whose true nature is concealed from the outside world and, in some respects, from the drinker as well. You think you’re drinking to have fun, to be sociable or more relaxed. But you’re also drinking to shut down, to retreat (103).

She develops an attraction to white wine that’s so deep that she still has trouble watching it go by on a tray at a restaurant, gazing at it “the way you might look at a photograph of someone you loved deeply and painfully and then lost” (105). White wine is one of the first drinks she consumes alone in her first post-college apartment. It makes her feel sophisticated and independent, even though she isn’t really either of these things. What Knapp is, for certain, is uncomfortable and insecure, worried that she’s not making progress on her to-do list and desperate for a perfect career, friendship, or love relationship to land on her doorstep. She drinks alone because it “is what you do when you can’t stand the feeling of living in your own skin” (106).

Knapp knows that she wants to write for a living, but she gets distracted by her feelings when she knows she should be “gritting [her] teeth and checking the items off the list, one by one, even though it’s painful and you’re afraid” (108). When she’s drunk, she gets away from these painful feelings rather than muddling through them, which keeps her from becoming emotionally strong and resilient. Knapp needs these emotional resources to cope with the sexual harassment she encounters from her landlord and even strange men on the street, and when she doesn’t have the strength to deal with her feelings about these events, she turns to alcohol. She also falls into a pattern that continues as her drinking increases: she tells herself that she’ll deal with her problems when she feels less depressed. Knapp often questions her own value while feeling extremely angry, a painful combination she regards as “a universal female experience” (111).

When Knapp gets a newspaper job a year later, she earns praise but struggles to feel valuable outside the office. She’d encounter the landlord who harassed her or get catcalled on the street and feel frightened, confused, and unworthy once again. She drinks to numb these feelings and find something resembling comfort when she’s at home. “[I]t kept me from the task of learning to tolerate my own company,” she says, noting how naked and uncomfortable she felt when she wasn’t covered in the emotional armor alcohol provides (114). When she was alone with alcohol, it seemed like the only way to access her true emotions. But then she’d wake up the next morning, unaware that she’d called someone she knew and sobbed for hours. On one occasion, Knapp calls her mother while drunk and feeling sorry for herself and admits that she might have a drinking problem. She promises that she’ll deal with it, but she doesn’t follow through. This is three years before making a similar promise to her mother on Martha’s Vineyard.