Drinking: A Love Story

by Caroline Knapp

I think I knew on some level that the drinking and the depression were connected, but I also believed that the undercurrents of despair were somehow central to my work, that drink was an occupational hazard, part of the writer’s territory. Tennessee Williams said that he never wrote without first drinking wine. William Styron used liquor, and often, not to help him write but to help him think, a means, he writes, of letting his mind “conceive visions that the unaltered, sober brain has no access to.” I identified with that. I identified with legions of drinking writers: Carson McCullers, Dylan Thomas, Dorothy Parker, and Thomas Wolfe; Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald; Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Roethke, and Jack London. Drinking seemed like part of the turf to me, and there was a hard-edged glamour to writers like that I found deeply attractive. These were dark and tortured souls, artists, people who lived life on a deeper plane than the rest of us, and drinking seemed like a natural outgrowth of their lives and work, both a product of and an antidote to creative angst.