Drinking: A Love Story

by Caroline Knapp

Most alcoholics I know experience that hunger long before they pick up the first drink, that yearning for something, something outside the self that will provide relief and solace and well-being. You hear echoes of it all the time in AA meetings, that sense that there’s a well of emptiness inside and that the trick in sobriety is to find new ways to fill it, spiritual ways instead of physical ones. People talk about their fixations with things— a new house they’re looking to buy, or a job they’re desperate for, or a relationship—as though these things have genuinely transformative powers, powers to heal and save and change their lives. Searching, searching: the need cuts across all backgrounds, all socioeconomic lines, all ages and sexes and races. Part of this, of course, is culturally determined or, at least, culturally reinforced. The search for a fix, for a ready solution to what ails, has become a uniquely American undertaking, an ingrained part of consumer culture, as prevalent as the nearest diet workshop or plastic surgeon. In some ways alcoholism is the perfect late twentieth-century expression of that particular brand of searching, an extreme expression of the way so many of us are taught to confront deep yearnings. Fill it up, fill it up, fill it up. Fill up the emptiness; fill up what feels like a pit of loneliness and terror and rage; please, just take it away, now. Our society has become marvelously adept at presenting easy—or seemingly easy—solutions to that...