Drinking: A Love Story

by Caroline Knapp

the pieces of you that have to do with integrity and self-esteem, are slowly rotting away.

think of memories as tiny living things, microorganisms that swim through the brain until they’ve found the right compartment in which to settle down and rest. If the compartment isn’t available, if there’s no proper label for the memory, it takes up residence somewhere else, gets lodged in a corner and gnaws at you periodically, cropping up at odd times, or in dreams.

too drunk to have feelings.

that’s what the silence was about; that’s where the veils of sadness and tension came from; that’s why I never saw my parents hug, or explode with passion or emotion or rage: all the energy went into hiding things, keeping the lid on feelings.

Drinking alone is what you do when you can’t stand the feeling of living in your own skin.

I may have woken up with a pounding headache, but I continued to function. As I recall, I went sailing that day, and while I felt lousy—a few times the water got choppy and I thought I might actually heave right there over the side of the boat—nobody,

So you worry and you deny. You worry and you drink. Jean Rhys describes this in Good Morning, Midnight: “In the middle of the night you wake up. You start to cry. What’s happening to me? Oh, my life, my youth. . . . There’s some wine left in the bottle. You drink it. The clock ticks. Sleep. . . .” Rhys is describing the line between problem drinking and alcoholism, which appears for the briefest moments and then disappears, renders itself invisible.

We seem to be attuned to a certain kind of music, a chorus of more, and we learn to determine which other people hear it, too, which ones understand our special liquid logic, and which ones don’t. The drinker who’s in a hurry to get the first drink most definitely hears it, the one who looks up two minutes after you’ve sat down at a table and snaps, “Where’s the damn waitress?” So does the drinker who gulps that first one down, who looks down shortly after the round has arrived and notices the glass is already empty. The chorus plays in the mind, liquid lyrics. The drinker who’s always game for another, who’d rather stay and drink than go out and eat, who encourages the rest of the people at the table to keep drinking, who feels secret relief when the nondrinkers in the group pick up their coats and straggle off—that drinker hears the music. About half the alcohol in the U.S. is consumed by eleven percent of the population: together, we do a lot of singing.*15

The shape of addiction is circular.

With each day you spend in the bad situation, your dignity erodes just a little bit more, keeping your feet glued more firmly to the floor.

“Insight,” he said, “is almost always a rearrangement of fact.”