Drinking: A Love Story

by Caroline Knapp

When we drank together, my sense of time would shift. Sam would get there, and there’d be a slightly self-conscious twenty minutes or half hour until we’d eased our way into the drinks and conversation, and the next thing you knew, it would be two or three hours later and we’d be in the middle of some deep talk about family, or therapy, or work, and I’d feel right there, genuinely united, as though we’d really spoken to and heard one another. I loved those moments, that sense that the world had boiled down to such simple elements: me and Sam and the two glasses on the table; everything else—the clink of waiters clearing tables, the low buzz of talk from others around us—just background music. Drinking was the best way I knew, the fastest and simplest, to let my feelings out and to connect, just sit there and connect, with another human being. The comfort was enormous: I was an easier, stronger version of myself, as though I’d been coated from the inside out with a warm liquid armor.

Drinking alone is enormously self-protective, at least in theory. The solitude relieves you of human contact, which can feel burdensome to even the most gregarious alcoholic, and the alcohol relieves you of your own thoughts, of the dark pressure of your own company. Drinking alone is what you do when you can’t stand the feeling of living in your own skin. Boswell describes this in his Life of Johnson: “I drink alone,” Johnson explains, “to get rid of myself, to send myself away. Wine makes a man better pleased with himself.”

There’s something about sober living and sober thinking, about facing long afternoons without the numbing distraction of anesthesia, that disabuses you of the belief in externals, shows you that strength and hope come not from circumstances or the acquisition of things but from the simple accumulation of active experience, from gritting the teeth and checking the items off the list, one by one, even though it’s painful and you’re afraid. When you drink, you can’t do that. You can’t make the distinction between getting through painful feelings and getting away from them. All you can do is just sit there, numb and sipping, numb and drunk.