Drinking: A Love Story

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“Quietly moving…Caroline Knapp dazzles us with her heady description of alcohol’s allure and its devastating hold.” ―Los Angeles Times Book Review

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 all fell apart. Drinking is Caroline Knapp’s harrowing chronicle of her twenty-year love affair with alcohol.

Caroline had her first drink at fourteen. She drank through her years 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.

“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 a triumph; it is one.” ―Newsweek