Drinking: A Love Story

by Caroline Knapp

I liked that ritual long before I started to drink myself. Without realizing it I learned to look forward to it. My parents were normally so quiet:

Enough? That’s a foreign word to an alcoholic, absolutely unknown. There is never enough, no such thing. You’re always after that insurance, always mindful of it, always so relieved to drink that first drink and feel the warming buzz in the back of your head, always so intent on maintaining the feeling, reinforcing the buzz, adding to it, not losing it. A woman I know named Liz calls alcoholism “the disease of more,” a reference to the greediness so many of us tend to feel around liquor, the grabbiness, the sense of impending deprivation and the certainty that we’ll never have enough. More is always better to an alcoholic; more