Drinking: A Love Story

“There 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.“

Throughout the book, Knapp points out ways drinking has made her life murky and difficult to navigate. She also examines the ways that it keeps her from making progress in her life—especially in her relationships—and from breaking patterns that are destructive, dysfunctional, or both. Despite these challenges, she is not as helpless as she feels. Though drinking clouds her insight, she still has moments of clarity about her situation and what she needs to do to escape the grip of alcoholism. Somewhere, deep inside, she senses that her alcohol use isn’t simply a way of coping with her lack of forward motion; it is one of the things that is holding her back. For starters, it’s a way for Knapp to avoid her problems; this avoidance is one reason she remains mired in habits and patterns that do not serve her well. Plus, alcohol makes her unable to see alternatives to her present situation and chips away at her belief that she’s capable of changing for the better.

“Active alcoholics try and active alcoholics fail. We make the promises and we really do try to stick with them and we keep ignoring the fact that we can’t do it, keep rationalizing the third drink, or the fourth or fifth. Just today. Bad day. I deserve a reward. I’ll deal with it tomorrow.”

Knapp is convinced that alcoholics usually intend to keep the promises they make about drinking, but that their drive to rationalize their alcohol use is too strong to overcome. In addition to being the cause of broken promises, this rationalization is a sign that alcohol has gained too much value in someone’s life, she says. Knapp also argues that rationalization goes hand-in-hand with other classic behaviors of alcoholics, such as denial and deception. She shares examples from her life to illustrate her point. For instance, she started out rationalizing nights of excessive drinking by telling herself that she deserved a drink after enduring a bad day. As Knapp’s addiction worsened, she began rationalizing other behaviors as well, such as her habit of withholding information from two boyfriends to avoid the potential consequences of dating them at the same time.

“Trying to describe the process of becoming an alcoholic is like trying to describe air. It’s too big and mysterious and pervasive to be defined. Alcohol is everywhere in your life, omnipresent, and you’re both aware and unaware of it almost all the time; all you know is you’d die without it, and there is no simple reason why this happens, no single moment, no physiological event that pushes a heavy drinker across a concrete line into alcoholism. It’s a slow, gradual, insidious, elusive becoming.”

Knapp argues that becoming an active alcoholic tends to be a gradual process. She can’t recall a particular moment where she went from drinking normally to having a drinking problem, but she’s also unsure if she ever had a healthy relationship with alcohol. Knapp suspects that she inherited at least part of her predisposition for alcoholism, most likely from her father. She also knows that she has other conditions that make her more likely to suffer from alcohol addiction. These include depression and anorexia. Because identifying the source of alcoholism is so complicated, and because the disease itself is complicated, with both physical and psychological components, Knapp feels frustrated when people say it has a simple cause: moral weakness. Though people like the simplicity of this explanation, she knows it isn’t true and feels it is unfair to alcoholics who make mighty efforts to manage the disease and rebuild the identities that addiction steals from them.

“Drinking seemed like part of the turf to me, and there was a hard-edged glamour to writers like that I found deeply attractive. These were dark and tortured souls, artists, people who lived life on a deeper plane than the rest of us, and drinking seemed like a natural outgrowth of their lives and work, both a product of and an antidote to creative angst.”

Knapp admires many writers who drank, including Martin Amis, Ernest Hemingway, and Dorothy Parker, and mentions several of these figures in Drinking: A Love Story. She sees drinking as a sort of “occupational hazard” that comes with her chosen profession (15). Knapp also identifies with the depression that often accompanies alcoholism. This enduring melancholy unites her with her father, who experiences something similar, and she suspects that it helps her create better work. Work created under the influence of alcohol or depression is supposedly better because it contains essential truths and insights that work created under other conditions would not. In actuality, Knapp’s alcoholism stunts her ability to find insight and communicate it to others.

“I was aware of an undercurrent of fear deep in my gut, a barely definable sensation that the ground beneath my feet wasn’t solid or real.”

Early in her career as a journalist, Knapp feels like a fraud the moment she leaves the office and sheds the professional persona she’s been presenting all day. Even though she’s earned praise and produced good work for hours, day after day, she doesn’t feel valuable. She almost feels as if she doesn’t exist. Knapp struggles to deal with these sensations and other negative feelings, including a gnawing sense of sadness, when she goes home. To cope, she starts going out more, which often involves drinking. She also begins drinking at home so she won’t have to marinate in these difficult emotions.

“Alcohol travels through families like water over a landscape, sometimes in torrents, sometimes in trickles, always shaping the ground it covers in inexorable ways.”

Knapp highlights alcohol’s liquid properties as she traces its destructive path through her family. At moments, its influence can be almost imperceptible, a trickle; at other times, this influence is so obvious that it can’t be denied. Whether alcohol is asserting itself violently or subtly, it leaves consequences in its wake. In Knapp’s family, these consequences include secrecy, destruction of trust, and a child who suffers from fetal alcohol syndrome.

“I can see the rocking now as a first addiction of sorts. It calmed me, took me out of myself, gave me a sense of relief.”

Knapp says rocking back and forth as a child was her first addiction because it brought her the kind of relief that drinking and anorexia later provided. She felt drawn to it by an almost magnetic force, and she was unable to drop the habit for years because it was so soothing and delivered detachment from troubling thoughts and other stressors. This rocking is also a behavior that her disabled half-brother, Wicky, exhibited; it’s one of the only traits Knapp says they shared.

“It melts down the pieces of us that hurt or feel distress; it makes room for some other self to emerge, a version that’s new and improved and decidedly less conflicted.”

This quote addresses one of the ways that alcohol makes the drinker feel transformed. In addition to anesthetizing pain, alcohol makes it easy for the drinker to assume a different persona for a little while, a variation of himself that is more confident, more fun, or more likable in some way. Though these transformative effects may feel good, they prevent the drinker from doing the work necessary to truly become who they want to be. They also keep themselves from developing the strength to deal with difficult emotions and conflicted states of mind.

“When you drink in order to transform yourself, […] [y]ou lose your bearings, the ground underneath you begins to feel shaky. After a while you don’t know even the most basic things about yourself—what you’re afraid of, what feels good and bad, what you need in order to feel comforted and calm—because you’ve never given yourself a chance, a clear, sober chance, to find out.”

Knapp explains how drinking can take over a person’s life and wreak havoc on their identity. She says this is more likely to happen if the drinker seeks alcohol’s transformative effects. Frequent alcohol use makes the drinker spend less time as their true self and more time as a false version thereof, a persona that doesn’t have to deal with the problems and conflicted emotions of everyday life. It keeps the alcoholic from forming opinions and prevents them from getting the practice needed to cope with difficult feelings effectively. In short, the alcoholic loses himself or herself as they cede power and identity to alcohol.

“[T]he martinis allowed me to indulge in that attraction, to flirt with it, to tap in to a feeling of power I was otherwise too self-conscious and fearful to acknowledge.”

This quote addresses how alcohol pulls Knapp into a precarious situation with her academic mentor, Roger. He begins to make unwanted sexual advances when they are drinking, but she doesn’t tell him to stop kissing and groping her. Alcohol makes her feel powerful and convinces her that it’s okay to use the attraction Roger feels to get what she wants, even if she has no interest in being involved with him sexually or romantically. Knapp knows she wouldn’t behave this way if she wasn’t drinking, but she lets the episodes of drinking and groping continue because the alcohol seems to give her power and control.

“The liquor numbs the real feelings and the real fears and the real doubts; it deprives you of the courage it takes to be honest. You lose your hold on who you really are and you find yourself in bad situations: sitting in some professor’s car, being groped; sitting at dinner with your boyfriend, withholding information. Keeping secrets.”

In addition to being addicted to the sense of power alcohol gives her, Knapp finds that drinking blunts other feelings that might help and protect her. When Roger starts touching her without her consent, she doesn’t protest even though she’s scared because the alcohol she’s drinking dulls her emotional response. Instead of making her truly courageous, the alcohol makes her feel confused, which prevents her from being honest with herself, with Roger, and with her boyfriend at the time, who knows nothing about her drunken escapades with Roger. Knapp says that, if anything, the alcohol made her more cowardly. When she returns home to her boyfriend, David, after an intoxicated outing with Roger, she can’t bear to be open and honest. Instead, she hides. She shuts down and stops talking because she can’t process what has just happened to her. Her memories of the situation are blurry, her emotional responses are blunted, and she doesn’t want to admit that she behaved in this way.

“[T]he beer, and the one after that and the bottle of wine after that, served a very specific purpose: it kept me from that piercing consciousness of self, kept me from the task of learning to tolerate my own company.”

Knapp explains how excessive drinking is a mode of anesthetizing one’s emotions, which can prevent a person from achieving personal growth. Knapp used alcohol to dull the pain, fear, and loneliness she felt when alone in her apartment, bothered by doubts and insecurities. Her mind would be filled with attacks on her self-worth, fears about men, worries about career stagnation, and other concerns, so she’d drink to make them fade into the background instead of figuring out how to function in their presence. Knapp says this avoidance kept her from maturing for a long time and harmed her relationship with herself as well as her relationships with others.

“Alcoholics tend to drink alone even when they’re drinking with other people.”

This quote highlights how alcoholism can isolate people by making them less present in their own lives and relationships. Knapp says that even if an alcoholic is consuming liquor in a group, he or she is likely to be wrapped up in details of the act and detached from the social and emotional aspects of togetherness. The alcohol becomes more important than the people in the room. For instance, instead of fully engaging with others at a gathering, Knapp would meticulously plan how to obtain her next drink or hide the extent of her consumption from the people in her presence. These activities reduced her ability to focus on what others were doing, saying, or feeling in social situations. Though she didn’t consciously choose to divorce herself from the social and emotional aspects of her surroundings, this action made her feel less connected to others and in turn more alone, even as she was spending time with them.

“This is one of our culture’s most basic assumptions about the disease, and one of its most destructive: […] that it can be overcome by will.”

Knapp argues that if alcoholism could be overcome by will, most alcoholics would have conquered the disease long ago. In her view, alcoholics are constantly fighting to get their drinking under control; many simply don’t realize that it’s impossible to drink in moderation if you truly suffer from alcoholism, a form of addiction that is a physical and psychological disease. She also stresses how essential the physical components of the condition are, noting that talk therapy alone often isn’t enough to squash the addiction. People who do not suffer from alcoholism know when to stop drinking because their bodies tell them so, but this is not true for alcoholics. Knapp finds it insulting and frustrating that people who have never experienced the physical challenges of alcoholism think they know so much about how to overcome the problem.

“And like drinking, anorexia was a strategy, a way of managing strong emotion.”

Knapp says that people who struggle with addiction often move from one form of this problem to another. In her case, she developed full-blown alcoholism after spending several years in the clutches of anorexia. The restrictive eating she practiced as an anorexic served many of the same purposes that drinking would serve later: dulling emotions that felt too strong to handle, feeling an enhanced sense of power and control (even if this sense was false), and keeping her from addressing persistent problems in her life. And like alcoholism, anorexia was full of rituals that kept Knapp from dwelling on other concerns such as her relationships or the problems affecting her family.

“At a time when I felt essentially uncertain and worthless, starving gave me a goal, something to be good at.”

Knapp describes herself as a good student and a people pleaser, someone who seeks others’ approval and constructs her identity around this feedback. After graduating from college, Knapp isn’t able to achieve this approval through academic performance, and she struggles with feelings of doubt and worthlessness when her career doesn’t launch immediately. Starving herself gives her something to achieve; it convinces her that she’s making progress, even though this “progress” is harmful to her health, identity, and relationships.

“Drinkers know each other; we can pick each other out of a crowd the way new mothers can, or army veterans, or any other members of a group united by the deepest sort of common cause and experience.”

Here, Knapp highlights the power of shared experience, a key component of groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous. There’s power in having a deep, personal connection to part of another person’s life. It brings about a certain level of understanding and makes empathy possible. It can also foster long-lasting bonds, much like going through a war with fellow soldiers. Plus, people who are feeling some of the same joys and facing some of the same pains are often pursuing similar goals. In other words, shared experiences can breed mutual support and a shared vision of progress.

“A single drink can make you feel unstoppable, masterful, capable of solving problems that overwhelmed you just five minutes before. In fact, the opposite is true: drinking brings your life to a standstill, makes it static as a rock over time.”

Knapp argues that the feeling of power and invincibility that drinking can produce is a dangerous illusion. In reality, alcohol addiction hampers people’s efforts to solve problems and reduces their overall ability to function. In addition to impeding progress in personal growth and relationships, drinking problems can rob life of its color and variety. Knapp explains how, at the height of her addiction, her life “took on a blank sameness, each day ritualized and invariable, barely distinguishable from the day before” (142).

“This time, I felt straighter, more honest. Drinking was a real problem in the relationship, not just a leitmotif. I drank and things went haywire.”

After moving out of Julian’s apartment, Knapp feels desperate and alone. She books an appointment with her therapist to talk through her feelings. During this conversation, she admits for the first time, in unambiguous terms, that she has a drinking problem. Though Knapp doesn’t see the many ways drinking is eroding her life, she can sense that it is a primary problem in her relationship with Julian. It is the fuel for their fights. Instead of blaming Julian or rationalizing the problem away, she decides that she wants to address it. Though it takes her several more years to choose sobriety, she takes her first tentative steps toward getting help at this therapy appointment. She is able to do so because she accepts that she has a problem and is able to move past her need to keep up appearances.

“Drink alcoholically for long enough and you start to get the feeling that things in life just happen to you, as though you’re living in a video, or reading from a script that someone else has written.”

This quote addresses how drinking problems can deprive people of their agency and make them feel detached from their lives. Knapp explains how as the addiction to alcohol intensifies, more and more things start to feel beyond the alcoholic’s control. As a result, feelings of helplessness are likely to increase. The sensation of living in a video or reading a script of one’s life may be a reflection of this shift in the alcoholic’s sense of power and control. It might also be a reflection of the distance an alcoholic places between themselves and others in order to maintain their addiction.

“Hitting bottom is generally preceded by a long, slow fall. This may be a semiconscious process, an almost deliberate decision to leap off the deep end.”

Knapp says that “hitting bottom”—the lowest point an alcoholic reaches before either dying or getting help—tends to happen internally. She describes her own descent as a swan dive, “a long, slow curving arc, the outlines of which [she] was able to see only in retrospect” (217). Her dive began when her father died and continued when her mother passed away. Ten months later, she landed in rehab. On her way to the bottom, her drinking takes on qualities it has never had before. For instance, her drinking didn’t have a noticeable effect on her work until she had almost hit bottom. During her descent, she begins pushing her work to the margins and rearranging her schedule to accommodate drinking. She hides nips of liquor in her bathrobe pockets, even while tending to her sick parents. She realizes that she’s no longer capable of feeling like herself until she’s had a few drinks, and this frightens her. And she feels more driven to drink than ever as she watches her parents slip away. As the tension builds, she succumbs to desperation, a state that is dangerously vulnerable but also a gift because it’s what often helps alcoholics take their first steps toward sobriety.

“That stillness keeps me coming, and it helps keep me sober, reminding me what it means to be alive to emotion, what it means to be human.”

At one point in Drinking: A Love Story, Knapp mentions that she can’t sit still for ten minutes without the anesthetizing effect alcohol provides. When she becomes sober, she must learn to sit still and sit with difficult-to-manage emotions. Watching other AA attendees be still helps her do it. In addition to modeling this behavior, AA members show her that sobriety can bring calm and peace. Plus, she knows they have faced struggles similar to her own, so she feels that she can be still if they can. Likewise, if they can stop drinking and learn to cope with painful emotions, she can do it as well. This knowledge inspires Knapp and keeps her coming back to AA meetings.

“When you’re actively alcoholic, you don’t bother to solve problems, even petty ones, in part because you have no faith in your ability to make changes and in part because even the smallest changes seem improbable and risky.”

Knapp says drinking robs alcoholics of a sense of agency by decreasing their confidence that they can solve problems and make positive changes. In contrast, when alcoholics become sober, they stop waiting for change to happen to them. Activity replaces passivity and they start solving problems again because, bit by bit, they believe they can. So, in addition to curbing the drinking that’s complicating their lives, they start working on other problems that compel them to seek relief through alcohol use. Plus, letting go of passivity can be empowering, Knapp notes that being passive “is corrosive to the soul; it feeds on feelings of integrity and pride, and it can be as tempting as a drug” (261).