Summary Of Drinking By Caroline Knapp

Drinking: A love story by Caroline Knapp is a memoir of Knapp’s love story with alcohol. The novel is in told is Knapp’s point of view in which she tells the story of her downward spiral of her addictive nature. She describes how the effect alcohol had on her emotions, relationship, and thoughts. The beginning of the book explains how she became an alcoholic which further progresses to how she knew she had a problem. She was first introduced to alcohol by her father, whom she has a good relationship with as he seemed to worry about her feelings because he had related to them.
In her twenties, she became anorexic. In this part of the book she relates the physical craving for alcohol is the same physical pain felt when famished. After she got help with her anorexia, she picked up drinking once again to help her cope with the feelings she was unable to deal with sober. Drinking made life easier for Knapp.
Consistent throughout the book, Knapp shows signs of needing love and affection to cure her depression. She finds a man named Julien who seems to fulfill her needs. However, Julian is a man who needs his women to work for his affection. He asked her to always look presentable and Caroline need

alcohol to sustain her relationship in which she also believed she needed. After her break up with Julien she meets Micheal, a sweet loving guy. She conflicts between the need of acceptance by Julian and the tender and free love Michael gives.
Running on drinks at a time, she explains how alcohol becomes her need for survival. She cannot let go of Michael or Julien. She cannot cope with the death of her father and mother. When he mother dies, she drinks to blackout drunk every night. After describing the road to acceptance of alcoholism, she finally describes her long road of sobriety. She goes to rehab and AA meetings working one day at a time to have the courage to put the drink down. (Knapp.)

Description of how the novelist identifies with addition
The opening line of Drinking: A Love Story begins with, “It happened this way: I fell in love and the, because the love was ruining everything I care about, I had to fall out.” Assuming that the love most people think of is between one person and another yet Knapp uses this metaphor of love which links to the love of alcohol. A substance that ruined her live as she became dependent on it. Throughout the book she uses reason to justify her drinking problem. “I drank when I was happy and I drank when I was bored and I drank when i was depressed, which was often” (Knapp 3). The book tells a story of her many disasters in her life. She uses these disasters to explain why she drank. Throughout the book, one learns more about alcoholism itself and also how it effects oneself, however one simile Knapp writes sums it up. “Trying to describe the process of becoming an alcoholic is like trying to describe air” (Knapp 9). Although Knapp explains significant points of alcoholism but only an alcoholic can fully understand alcoholism. She compares the love of a drink to the love of a person which shows how much she truly is attracted to this substance (11). Alcoholism is something that grows gradually. She says, “I cant say for sure when the drinking shifted from normal to necessary” (26), which shows that alcoholism is a slow coming disease which is “encoded in your DNA (28). Yet was Knapp an alcohol by genetics or was it her dramatic life that led to a dependent lifestyle?
When Knapp’s father gets sick she begins to describe how her drinking progresses. “His illness opened a well of fear in my chest that felt bottomless and i Drank to fill it, to escape it, to numb it” (49). The drink she uses to fill, escape and numb her feelings symbolizes a utopia, as if nothing in the world is wrong. Alcohol also symbolizes a sense of comfort. She describes the hunger she craves, “Nothing is going to do the trick here except wine. Nothing is going to make me feel less awkward or less depressed or less anxious except more wine. Nothing” (55). She uses the reason of depression to justify her drinking a lot throughout the book. This is significant because alcohol is a depressant and she explains how it eases the discomfort, “All this shit I feel-when I drank, it just went away” (62). On page 70, Knapp uses an equations to help understand the transformation and effect on your life, “ Pain+Drink=Self-Obliteration.” She goes deeper into say, “The drink of deception: alcohol gives you power and robs you of it in equal measure (87). Knapp’s diction is simple yet the power of the simple words speak more than a complex word. This is because describing alcoholism isn't complicated to say, its only complicated to understand. Alcohol as a depressant numbs your real feelings, fears and doubts and it makes you lose yourself while you are trying to find yourself. In many ways alcohol is liquid courage and in other ways it is a way to shut down into a different world. “Drinking alone is what you do when you can’t stat the feeling of living in your own skin” (98). Drinking is a was to be panfry without having to deal with reality. Alcohol isolates you from everything; it’s in the mind. On page 101, Knapp admits to a time in her life where she was truly depressed. This is the main part in her life where her drinking increases. A smilie she says, “One of these days that’s going to be me, forced to figure out how to live alone without the armor” (103), the aromas being the alcohol that protects one to actually feel and are scared to feel.
In the chapter, Addiction, she uses real sources to define addiction.

She does this because she was misunderstood when it came to understanding her “drinking problem.” She talks about the statistics with a conversations tone about how excessive drinking cause the brain to only make dopamine when alcohol is present in your body. Your brain makes the metal connection that in order to be happy and feel good, one must drink. Alcoholism comes upon one quickly. When you find yourself drinking to feel pleasure you have crossed the line of a social drinker into an alcoholic (113- 118). She uses the cucumber-to-pickle analogy to explain this by saying, “you can try to stop a cucumber from turing into a pickle but there’s no way you can turn a pickle back into a cucumber”

(119).
The thing about alcoholism is that admitting to your problem is the the biggest problem. “Sometimes you see, but you don't act” (174). Denial that you are an alcoholic is common because every drink is justified with a reason. The reason is because of a hard day at work, a depress mood, boredom, or even celebration, whatever the reason may be to pick up that drink one denies the things they don't understand. Knapp summarizes the confusion addicts feel with, “-you simply do not understand-why you’re so miserable, so fucking depressed and full of hate. And so you drink again; of course you drink again. You cant stand this-it’s too much-and drinking is one sure way, the only way, to kill the feeling” (170.)
Alcohol because a problem in relationships. In Knapp’s case she is looking for love, affection, and guidance. She needs something that offers more protection than the substance she abuses. What lacks in her relationships is made up for with the consumption of alcohol. Alcoholism has many paradoxes that Knapp describes as, “alcholics drink in order to east the very pain that drinking helps create (189). By this she means the pain you feel cause you to drink and the pain continues so you drink more.
The line, “I had always thought: I drink because I’m unhappy. Just then, I shifted the equation rearranged the words: Maybe, just maybe, I’m unhappy because I drink” (218), guides one to a deeper understanding. After saying this, Knapp deals with her addiction with rehab and the 12 steps. She compares her reaching for help and guidance as being timid like a teenage book asking a girl out on a date (229). Alcoholics have a hard time grasping the coping method because their coping method is what put them in the position they are in. They worry about experiencing the reality they have been escaping for years without their partner in crime. She describes sobriety in a smilie like fashion, “When people talk like that about their deepest pain, a stillness ofter falls over the rom, a hush thats so deep and so deeply shared it feels like reverence” (232). Then she ends with a confident tone, that the strength the AA community had to put down that drink was an affection for their humanity. She symbolizes that the feeling and strength was love (254). It is love because sometimes you have to walk away from the things you love.