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.


From Publishers Weekly
Freelance journalist Knapp began drinking in her early teens and continued unabatedly until she "hit bottom" in 1995 and checked herself into a rehab at the age of 36. During that time she managed to graduate with honors from Brown and have a successful career as a journalist, and few people suspected she had a problem with the bottle. Here she recounts the years of denial that helped her rationalize the blackouts, innumerable hangovers, broken relationships and family tensions characteristic of the alcoholic's story. Knapp interweaves her personal history with factual information about alcohol abuse, including frequent references to the AA meetings she's attended. Here's a confession utterly devoid of self-pity, an extraordinarily lucid and very well-written personal account of a common addiction that is filled with insights as well as a comprehensive treatment of the subject. The text reproduces a questionnaire for alcoholism made up by the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence. First serial to the New York Times Magazine and Cosmopolitan; Literary Guild selection; author tour. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Knapp, a contributing editor for New Woman magazine and weekly columnist for the Boston Phoenix, has written a personal story of her journey through the maze of alcoholism. Because Knapp is a skilled writer, the engrossing and insightful story transcends the purely confessional tone and becomes of interest to many. One of Knapp's recurring themes concerns the denial that alcoholics practice before admitting their disease. Because she came from a middle-class home where drinking was practiced socially, and not from a place of "chaos and storm," she thought that "true alcoholics" were the "unstable and the lunatic." Gradually, she came to admit that she, too, was an alcoholic and with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous began her recovery. Overall, this book will comfort and sustain the recovering alcoholic while enlightening others who want to understand the psychological dependency involved in alcoholism. Recommended for public libraries.?Barbara O'Hara, Free Lib. of PhiladelphiaCopyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review
A talented stylist.


From Booklist
Knapp, a magna cum laude graduate of Brown University, journalist, and contributing editor to New Woman magazine, was not a stereotypical drunk. Instead, as a "high-functioning alcoholic," she kept her addiction--and hangovers--hidden. She never called in sick from too much liquor or drank on the job yet would imbibe night after night, lusting after the sound, feel, and camaraderie of booze. During her 20-year affair with alcohol, she led a double life, often sneaking shots at dinner parties or slipping into a restaurant bar for an extra round while her dinner companion thought she'd left for the ladies' room. "Beneath my own witty, professional facade were oceans of fear, whole rivers of self-doubt," she writes. Then she hit bottom and did a stint in rehab. AA meetings several times a week keep her sober. Detailing the reasons why she needed to medicate her feelings and the choices she has made to stay clean, Knapp offers, in well-crafted prose, hope for other women alcoholics desperate to stop drinking. Jennifer Henderson


From Kirkus Reviews
Boston columnist and New Woman contributing editor Knapp writes with unflinching honesty about her 20 years as an alcoholic, her struggle to overcome the addiction, and the special peril facing women drinkers. Knapp was a drinker able to hold down a steady job while convincing herself (and others) that her drinking was not interfering with her life--that, in fact, it was making life easier. She drank to forget her problems or to get through a crisis. She rationalized the drinking by telling herself that she would stop after she came through an especially rough situation, never realizing that the drinking contributed to her difficulties. Knapp drank during her simultaneous involvement with two men, hiding each from the other. She drank through her parents' painful deaths a year apart, raiding their liquor cabinet, hiding bottles in the bathroom. The death of her prominent analyst father--and the subsequent realization that he, too, had been an alcoholic--started her on the slow path to recovery, although it was almost two years after his death before she checked herself into a clinic. His death made her wonder ``if I would have been able to let go of alcohol without letting go of my father first.'' Through rehab and nightly AA meetings she was finally able to take control of her life. Knapp also suffered from anorexia during her 20s, and she believes that there is a link for women between food disorders, drinking, and other addictions. She suggests that women are particularly vulnerable to the belief that the abuse of drink, drugs, and food can and will change them for the better--not realizing the terrible physical and emotional tolls of such behavior. Knapp is prone to repetitiousness, but this is still a soul- baring memoir with cogent insights into the nightmarish world of addiction. (Literary Guild alternate selection; author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Fifteen million Americans a year are plagued with alcoholism. Five million of them are women. Many of them, like Caroline Knapp, started in their early teens and began to use alcohol as "liquid armor," a way to protect themselves against the difficult realities of life. In this extraordinarily candid and revealing memoir, Knapp offers important insights not only about alcoholism, but about life itself and how we learn to cope with it.

SYNOPSIS

Fifteen million Americans a year are plagued with alcoholism. Five million of them are women. Many of them, like Caroline Knapp, started in their early teens and began to use alcohol as "liquid armor," a way to protect themselves against the difficult realities of life.

FROM THE CRITICS

James Marcus

Caroline Knapp started drinking when she was 14, and spent almost 20 years as an alcoholic. Throughout the 1980s she maintained a good front, holding down a high-pressure job at the Boston Phoenix and keeping her addiction under wraps. Much of the time she managed to hide it even from herself: "You know and you don't know. You know and you won't know, and as long as the outsides of your life remain intact -- your job and your professional persona -- it's very hard to accept that the insides, the pieces of you that have to do with integrity and self-esteem, are slowly rotting away." This acceptance didn't come to Knapp until the early 1990s, when she finally entered a rehab program. Drinking, then, is a tale of recovery, with the emphasis on Before rather than After. When Knapp sticks to her own story, her writing is lucid and uncontaminated by self-pity. Her account of the way that alcohol "travels through families like water over a landscape" convinces us by its very specificity. Often, however, Knapp is unsure of whether she wants to write a literary memoir or a more general discussion of alcoholism. Over and over she interrupts herself to splice in statistics and vignettes she's collected from other drinkers, and while she delivers this stuff with requisite professionalism, it robs the book of its focus. Her story, she seems to suggest, approximates those of the other 15 million alcoholics in America. But approximations are exactly what we don't want in (as Knapp herself calls it) a love story. -- Salon

Publishers Weekly

In a starred review, PW called Knapp's memoir of alcoholism "extraordinarily lucid" and "filled with insights." (June)

Kirkus Reviews

Boston columnist and New Woman contributing editor Knapp writes with unflinching honesty about her 20 years as an alcoholic, her struggle to overcome the addiction, and the special peril facing women drinkers.

Knapp was a drinker able to hold down a steady job while convincing herself (and others) that her drinking was not interfering with her life—that, in fact, it was making life easier. She drank to forget her problems or to get through a crisis. She rationalized the drinking by telling herself that she would stop after she came through an especially rough situation, never realizing that the drinking contributed to her difficulties. Knapp drank during her simultaneous involvement with two men, hiding each from the other. She drank through her parents' painful deaths a year apart, raiding their liquor cabinet, hiding bottles in the bathroom. The death of her prominent analyst father—and the subsequent realization that he, too, had been an alcoholic—started her on the slow path to recovery, although it was almost two years after his death before she checked herself into a clinic. His death made her wonder "if I would have been able to let go of alcohol without letting go of my father first." Through rehab and nightly AA meetings she was finally able to take control of her life. Knapp also suffered from anorexia during her 20s, and she believes that there is a link for women between food disorders, drinking, and other addictions. She suggests that women are particularly vulnerable to the belief that the abuse of drink, drugs, and food can and will change them for the better—not realizing the terrible physical and emotional tolls of such behavior.

Knapp is prone to repetitiousness, but this is still a soul- baring memoir with cogent insights into the nightmarish world of addiction.