Drinking by Caroline Knapp

Drinking by Caroline Knapp

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.

It was love at first sight. The beads of moisture on a chilled bottle. The way the glasses clinked and the conversation flowed. Then it became obsession. The way she hid her bottles behind her lover's refrigerator. The way she slipped from the dinner table to the bathroom, from work to the bar. And then, like so many love stories, it fell apart. Drinking is Caroline Kapp's harrowing chronicle of her twenty-year love affair with alcohol.

Caroline had her first drink at fourteen. She drank through her yeras at an Ivy League college, and through an award-winning career as an editor and columnist. Publicly she was a dutiful daughter, a sophisticated professional. Privately she was drinking herself into oblivion. This startlingly honest memoir lays bare the secrecy, family myths, and destructive relationships that go hand in hand with drinking. And it is, above all, a love story for our times--full of passion and heartbreak, betrayal and desire--a triumph over the pain and deception that mark an alcoholic life.

Praise for Drinking

Quietly moving . . . Caroline Knapp dazzles us with her heady description of alcohol's allure and its devastating hold.--Los Angeles Times Book Review

Filled with hard-won wisdom . . . a] perceptive and revealing book.--San Francisco Chronicle

Eloquent . . . a remarkable exercise in self-discovery.--The New York Times

Drinking not only describes triumph; it is one.--Newsweek

Caroline Knapp was a regular columnist for The Boston Phoenix and a contributor to New Woman magazine, and her work has appeared in Mademoiselle, The New York Times, and several international publications. Alice K's Guide to Life and Pack of Two are two of her other books. Caroline Knapp, who was 42 at the time of her death, died in 2002.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780385315517
ISBN 10	0385315511
Title	Drinking
Author	Caroline Knapp
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc
Year published	1996-05-02
Number of pages	258
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.