Drinking: A Love Story

by Caroline Knapp

Mostly, we lie. That’s a statement of fact, not a judgment. Alcoholics lie about big things, and we lie about small things, and we lie to other people, and (above all) we lie to ourselves. John Cheever wrote about this in his journals, calling dishonesty “the most despicable trait.” He wrote, “You take a nap and claim to be tired from work. You hide a whiskey bottle in the cabinet and claim to be a wiser man than your friends who hide whiskey bottles in the closet. You promise to take a child to the circus and have such a bad hangover that you can’t move. You promise to send money to your old mother and do not.” Big lies, small lies: it’s hard to find an alcoholic who didn’t manipulate the truth about something, even if it was minor stuff, stuff that really didn’t add up to anything at all. My friend Gail used to lie about movies and books. If a group of people at work were talking about something they’d read, she’d chime in instinctively. “Oh, I read that,” she’d say, even if she hadn’t, or she’d say she loved some movie that other people loved, even if she’d never even heard of the movie, let alone seen it. To an outsider this sounds stupid and useless until you consider that people who drink constantly never really get a chance to know how they feel about anything, even things like movies and books. After a while drinkers just fall into the behavior, a way of overcompensating: we learn to pretend we have opinions because deep in our own hearts, we really don’t. Linnette...