68 pages • 2 hours read
Caroline KnappDrinking: A Love Story
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1996A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 14-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 14 Summary: “Hitting Bottom”
Knapp remembers talking to two fellow rehab residents, George and Chris. George asks how low one has to go to quit drinking. Chris says that truly hitting bottom is dying, and that an alcoholic has to find a way to quit drinking before that happens. Put another way, one has to get off the elevator before it reaches the basement. Knapp says there’s usually a long decline before reaching the bottom. Some alcoholics leap to start their descent, while others are pushed by other forces in their lives. Taking the leap, or surrendering oneself to alcohol, isn’t the same as hitting bottom but it gets an alcoholic to where he needs to go: a state of desperation Knapp characterizes as a “gift” (215).
Knapp’s trip to the bottom begins with her father’s death. Her mother’s illness makes her descend even more, until she finally reaches rehab. Watching her father’s illness shut down one part of his body after another is devastating. At the end, his memory and personality disappeared. Her mother’s illness is filled with anxiety-provoking tests and nightmarish hospital visits. For the most part, Knapp lets herself freefall with her alcohol use during this time:
During both illnesses, and after both deaths, I drank with the no-holds-barred abandon of the truly self-pitying drinker, every night until I passed out […] [but] what stands out are a few key scenes, ones that had less to do with the facts of illness and loss than with what I was forced to see through those experiences about myself (219).
For example, Knapp’s father confesses that the woman he’d had an affair with was still in his life, despite what he’d told her mother years earlier to keep the marriage intact. In fact, the affair had continued for years, and the woman had come to visit him in the hospital recently. Knapp’s mother is furious, and Knapp struggles to make sense of what she’s feeling. She remembers admitting to father what a mess she was in with Michael and Julian and how her father told her to stop procrastinating and start dealing with the part of herself that was allowing the mess to continue. This makes her feel angry. Later, she feels sadness and pity, realizing that her father “died believing in his soul that he’d somehow brought the brain tumor on himself” (221). She also feels gratitude, realizing that her father has showed her “what it means to live and die in a state of unresolved conflict” (221). Knapp knows that she doesn’t want to face the same fate.
Along with the desperation her out-of-control drinking brings about, this realization about her father’s life convinces Knapp that she can’t keep living the way she has been living because it might kill her. Even if it doesn’t kill her, she might become unemployed, suicidal, or unable to function, and she won’t have her parents to fall back on once they have died. Thankfully, she has not lost her job, gone to prison, or killed another person due to her drinking—not yet, anyhow. And drinking doesn’t bring her pleasure like it used to. “Pleasure wasn’t the point,” she realizes, “At the end I didn’t even feel like myself until I had a drink or two and I remember that it scared me a little” (231). She knows it just might be time to stop suffering, just as her mother tells her two months before succumbing to cancer. But before Knapp can commit to sobriety, she has a little farther to fall. Along the way, an appalling image gets burned into her brain, one of her father being lifted into a wheelchair like “a huge, grotesque version of a baby in the mouth of a stork” (224). To cope with this and similarly traumatic moments, she drinks “as though [she] were drinking life itself” (225).
Knapp drinks heavily when her father dies and is so drunk at her mother’s funeral reception that her sister tells her to take a nap. She loses her sense of boundaries and drunk-dials her mother’s friends. Knapp is forced to confess her problem to Michael when he finds her liquor stash at his house. But it isn’t until the holidays that she feels ready to change. First, she nearly kills her friend’s children over Thanksgiving. Then, she has some troubling revelations while attending a Christmas party with Julian. She feels as if she is recreating her parents’ lives against her will, with Julian calling all the shots and herself playing the victim. She catches a glimpse of herself in a mirror and sees an out-of-control drunk staring back at her. She flies into a drunken rage while taking Julian home. Then she calls her twin sister, Becca, crying. Becca tells her that she knows what Knapp needs to do: quit drinking.
The next day, Knapp calls Julian to apologize, and he says she doesn’t trust him because she doesn’t trust herself. She realizes he’s right. She never knows when she’s going to get too drunk. She reads an excerpt from Pete Hamill’s A Drinking Life in which he quotes Shirley MacLaine complaining that a filmmaker made a character she played succumb to drunkenness, a choice she considered a cheap shortcut. He chose “the drink instead of forcing the painful choice” (238). This flips the proverbial light switch for Knapp. The thing MacLaine describes is what happens when she drinks with Julian. Instead of standing up for herself or determining what she needs, Knapp gets drunk and succumbs to anger. She considers the possibility that she is unhappy because she drinks, not the other way around. Then she asks her sister to find her a rehab program. Two months later, Knapp has her last drink.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Help”
Knapp cries nearly every night between when she decides she must stop drinking and when she actually does it: “I felt like I was giving up the one link I had to peace and solace, my truest friend, my lover. I felt like I was trading in one form of misery for another, like I was about to leap into a void, like my life was ending” (242). Sometimes her whole head quakes from drinking, like her “brains were shaking in a fry pan” (243-44). This happens to her on the way to rehab, but she does her best to keep up her appearance, even when she’s at the facility. She applies her lipstick expertly, terrified to let her brokenness show on the outside. Knapp also fears that rehab won’t help her enough, that she’ll become one of those people who goes “in and out of rehabs and detoxes for years—years and years” (248).
For the most part, though, Knapp finds rehab helpful and encouraging, in part because she regains her sense of agency. She explains how early in their sobriety, many people “experience the classic pink cloud, a euphoria that comes from feeling like you’re doing something at last, taking charge of your life for the first time” (247). The structured nature of the rehab program appeals to her studious nature. By interacting with others at the center, she sees that it’s possible to forge connections without drinking. She also recognizes how bonds with other sober alcoholics can be beneficial, which gives her hope that AA might help her after she leaves rehab. Knapp characterizes the rehab center as glowing with survival, “as though we’d all been through a horrible war and had landed, alive, in a safe place” (247).
Knapp says she never considered that she might be able to quit drinking without going to rehab. She knew that some people were able to do this with a lot of help from AA and admits that she had a bias against such twelve-step groups. They seemed like a fad and had a tendency to use repetitive clichés, catchphrases, and slogans with a “New Age and cultlike” ring to them (246).
But rehab prepares Knapp for AA by using some of its sayings and principles, and because the center’s counselors genuinely believe it is an effective way to stay sober. When Knapp goes to AA meetings, she sees a piece of herself reflected in other attendees’ personal stories. This helps her connect. She also opens herself up to the possibility of change. “I felt like my brain could use a good scouring out by then and I was both frightened and desperate enough to set aside whatever biases I’d brought and just listen, to absorb,” she says, explaining how she was able to move past her reservations about AA’s style of communication (252). Knapp also appreciates the structure AA delivers, especially the way it provides a “blueprint for living” (253). The program’s twelve steps are focused on getting by rather than alcohol itself, and this is exactly what she needs to learn how to do, especially when she’s grappling with difficult emotions. Knapp also needs a place that reminds her of her roots, encourages her to reconnect with her identity, and shows her what she must do to change. AA does all of these things, and she can’t imagine being sober without it.
Chapter 16 Summary: “Healing”
For Knapp, the early phases of sobriety are a time of building emotional strength and resilience. She has many revelations, and they don’t just come in flashes. She identifies maladaptive patterns that have come to shape her life. She also reflects on some of the ways she and her father are alike. Knapp meets up with her father’s psychologist friend, Jack, who tells her that her father knew he was an alcoholic. This news brings about “a sharp stab of pain and horror,” and Knapp feels as if she’s “been caught breaking a profound family pattern, a code of behavior” (257-58). Knapp’s father only admits to his alcoholism out loud when he is dying, when it is too late to change the outcome of his actions. This horrifies and saddens Knapp. But in time, she finds freedom in the loss of her father. She says she discovers “a way of seeing myself or living my life that no longer required such entanglement with my father, a capacity for choice I’d never felt before” (258). Knapp finally realizes that yes, she is her father’s daughter, but she is so much more as well.
Knapp cries after learning this new information about her father: “I was holding on to the pieces of him I cherished—his insight, his wisdom, his charm—but also leaving him behind in some way, giving myself a chance to move past our ancient pact and toward something better” (259). Knapp says sobriety isn’t so much about getting better on some linear trajectory but becoming open to the changes that come with true growth. This includes taking an active role in solving one’s problems rather than passively waiting for someone or something else to fix things. Though this is healthy, it can be painful after a person has been stuck in one position for a long time. This shift from passivity to active problem-solving is also a sign of maturity, something Knapp realizes she has been severely lacking.
For Knapp, one of the most difficult problems to address is self-pity. She realizes that this is what triggers her drinking the most. She is frustrated when family members at a Thanksgiving party neglect to mention her sobriety or the loss of her parents. In the past, she would have turned to alcohol to cope. Choosing not to drink that day forced her to recognize that anesthetizing her feelings won’t change or resolve them. Knapp sees that sobriety won’t erase some of her problems overnight but that it does give her an opportunity to solve them. She accepts that the “attraction—the pull, the hunger, the yearning—doesn’t die when you say good-bye to the drink, any more than the pull toward a bad lover dies when you finally walk out the door” (268). But this relationship can take on a different quality. Instead of being like a love affair, it can be the kind of relationship one might have with an ex following a divorce. The hardest thing to accept is that she has a lifelong condition with no guarantee against relapse. She also dislikes the stigma that persists around alcoholism, but she is able to take things in stride through gratitude and faith in herself.
Knapp also shares some important moments from early in her sobriety. She mentions placing an AA chip on her mother’s grave and that she “felt tremendous sorrow in that act, in the accompanying acknowledgement that she’d never get to see me in sobriety, that we’d never experience a different, richer sort of relationship” (274). When Julian says, once again, that she has let him down, she lets it go, rather than reacting in anger. She also behaves more openly with him, letting him know that she wants to maintain her sobriety and see where things go with Michael. These actions help loosen Julian’s grip on her. She also becomes more comfortable alone, thanks in part to her choice to buy a house and live there by herself. Further, sobriety makes her feel that she has truly chosen to be with Michael. It also helps her fully appreciate his kindness without comparing it to anything or anyone else. She feels a new sense of confidence about relationships as well.
In addition to finding opportunities for gratitude and forgiveness, Knapp tries to replace some of her dysfunctional rituals with activities that promote healing and well-being. She shares an anecdote about what she calls the Ritualistic Snipping of the Black Lycra Dress, in which a friend from AA helps her cut the dress she despises into pieces. Each piece goes to one of Knapp’s closest friends, who can get rid of it however she’d like. Knapp also attends AA four or five times a week, turning it into a ritual that sustains and motivates her. She closes Drinking: A Love Story with a vision of love that’s quite different from that of a toxic romantic relationship. At one memorable AA meeting, she imagines each of the fifty people in attendance climbing into bed at night, clean, calm, and sober:
It was a simple image but it filled me with a range of complicated feelings: appreciation for their courage and strength; a tinge of melancholy for the amount of pain it must have taken each and every one of them to put down the drink; affection for their humanity. I didn’t realize until hours later that there was a name for that feeling. It’s called love (281).
Chapters 14-16 Analysis
Themes of losing control and taking charge infuse the last three chapters of Drinking: A Love Story. Knapp depicts her loss of control as she careens toward the proverbial bottom alcoholics hit before seeking help. Drinking no longer feels good; rather, it feels necessary:
Life becomes so insular and blank in the last stages of active alcoholism; the drinking at that point is much less a search for pleasure than it is a search for the absence of pain […] Joy gets drowned out along with every other emotion, and to rediscover it in sobriety is an amazing thing, the emotional equivalent of realizing that your shoes are painfully tight and then sighing with relief when you finally take them off (272, 273).
This loss of control also leads to an utter desperation Knapp describes as a gift because it’s an essential part of the decision to become sober. When Knapp begins her sobriety in rehab, she starts relearning how to take charge of the things in her life that she can control, many of which she had given up on when she was an active alcoholic. She begins filling a toolbox for solving some of the problems in her life, and she realizes that she needs to rediscover who she is and form her own opinions. Knapp also takes steps toward making peace with the things she can’t control, such as the fact that she harbors the potential to relapse.
Knapp’s journey to sobriety is sobering in more ways than one. She learns that only one in three alcoholics escapes the disease without dying from it. She also learns that no one is truly safe from alcoholism, that it affects people of all age groups, backgrounds, and walks of life. Of rehab, Knapp states:
I’d figured everyone there would be more or less like me—young people who drank too much and came there, for the first and only time, to stop—but the client population was all over the map: young and old, male and female; people like me, facing their alcoholism for the first time; people with longtime sobriety who’d relapsed (248).
She also discovers that she’ll need to learn how to live with discomfort. Instead of drinking to deal with discomfort, she reminds herself that discomfort is a reason she used to drink.
Gratitude also plays an important role in the book’s final chapters. Laughter feels new and pleasant, and she is thankful for it. As she learns to cope with discomfort and address her problems directly, she sees that her life feels more hopeful. She says it “has acquired a quality of lightness, and a sense of possibilities I didn’t even know I’d lost” (273). She is grateful for the lessons she learns from other AA attendees, and the ways they offer her support. In addition to providing relief, these meetings fill her with a sense of respect and reverence. Even when she feels like an “alien” in her own life because she has to relearn how to do so many things without alcohol, AA makes her feel like she belongs somewhere. She meets up with a man she used to hang out with while drunk and finds him utterly repulsive; though she is horrified that she spent time with him, she is thankful that she now has the perspective to keep him out of her life. Knapp is also grateful for the new perspective about who she should keep in her life, namely Michael. In fact, he is the person she seems the most grateful to know. Sobriety helps her fully appreciate his kindness: “If I’ve been through a war, he’s been in charge of triage through most of it, and sometimes the gratitude I feel toward him wells up so powerfully I think I’m going to burst” (276).
