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.
Themes
Drinking as Transformation and Escape
According to Knapp, many people drink to escape the problems that burden the present and transform themselves into versions of themselves that they like better. The catch is that drinking only does so for a short period of time. The more a person craves these features of alcohol, the more often they’re likely to seek a drink, which can lead to a dangerous pattern. Plus, escaping reality or putting on the mask of an alternate persona keeps people from getting to know themselves, learning to manage difficult emotions, and gaining the tools they need to solve problems. In short, overuse of alcohol can stunt many areas of their lives, from their maturity to their relationships with others.
Knapp notes that when someone repeatedly drinks for transformation, they find that their “relationship to the world becomes muddied and unclear” (75). Drink in this way enough, and “the mathematics of transformation change,” Knapp says (76). The drinker forgoes self-discovery for so long that they become unsure of who they are, uncertain which version of their self is the true one. This causes discomfort, which leads to more drinking, which leads to more problems, from relationship issues to legal trouble. Comfort becomes virtually impossible but the alcoholic will keep drinking in the hopes that the alcohol will help them locate what they’re seeking, even as it takes them farther away from the thing they need.
Drinking for escape brings about similar problems, including a lack of experience coping with difficult feelings. Knapp notes how she drank to escape the fear she felt when her father was dying. She notes how alcohol can help her escape her own head and the troubling thoughts that brew inside it. She shares journalist Nan Robertson’s quote about going into a tiny room in her mind and drawing the shades when she is drunk because she feels it communicates an essential truth about intoxication: that alcohol can take people to a different place. She compares this to “psychic flight, ingesting a simple substance and leaving yourself behind” (64). And Knapp explains how sober living pushes her to experience real emotions without the anesthetizing power of alcohol.
Leading a Double Life
Alcoholics often lead double lives in a few different ways, according to Knapp. The act of getting drunk makes a person develop at least one persona that is tied to their intoxication. The alcoholic may also develop a different persona for each group of people they drink with. Knapp recalls struggling when she switched from her work persona to her non-work persona, and how alcohol helped her drown out the insecurities that filled her mind when she removed her professional identity for the day. Knapp says this constant switching between personas can make alcoholics lose touch with who they actually are. She also argues that it prepares alcoholics for greater acts of deception and more elaborate forms of duplicity. Furthermore, it robs them of the energy to pursue more constructive activities. As Knapp puts it, “a great deal of the active alcoholic’s energy is spent constructing facades, an effort to present to others a front that looks okay, that seems lovable and worthy and intact,” but in the process, “the double life grows more sophisticated and more deeply entrenched” (193).
Knapp spends several pages of the book describing the double life her father lived. As his health declines during a long illness, she learns that he spent years hiding both his alcoholism and an affair from his family. The effort this secrecy and deception required likely contributed to his distant demeanor and emotional unavailability. Knapp didn’t know this for most of her life and struggled to interpret what the distance meant. When her father seemed cold and faraway, she thought it was because he couldn’t see her as anything but a psychoanalytic patient. Though his job and training may have made him behave in clinical ways, his detachment was likely also a reflection of his inner turmoil and the exhaustion resulting from it.
Knapp admits that, much like her father, she behaved in duplicitous ways to avoid facing consequences for her actions. As a young adult, she doesn’t want others to judge her drinking habits, so she keeps up the appearance of being a normal drinker by having a “show bottle” whose liquor disappears much slower than the contents disappear from the bottle she is actually drinking from. Knapp later begins actively distorting the truth in a variety of ways, for instance by lying, omitting information, or presenting facts in a misleading way. She does this to keep others from seeing her drinking as a problem, to keep David from finding out about Roger, and to keep Michael and Julian from discovering that she’s not as devoted to either of them as she makes herself out to be. The main reason she can’t commit to Michael or Julian is because she loves alcohol more than either of them. Once she breaks up with alcohol and finds herself once again, she can decide how to proceed with these relationships.
Fear of Men
Knapp mentions being afraid of various men in Drinking: A Love Story. Her father frightens her because he makes her feel exposed. When he probes her mind using psychoanalytic types of questions, he digs too deep. This makes it very hard for her to keep things private without lying about them. It also makes her feel vulnerable when she should feel protected. Plus, her parents don’t compensate by offering other protective gestures, such as hugs. As the probing continues, Knapp’s anxiety and fear grow and her relationship with her father becomes more fraught. At times, she is scared she will be consumed by his very presence. She also feels frightened of the anxiety and sadness he seems to carry. Though she doesn’t know its source for a long time, she knows that she, too, is prone to depression and that this similarity binds them together.
Knapp also describes feeling scared of Julian after he becomes her boyfriend. Like her father, he makes her feel small and exposed. He pushes her to wear things that make her feel ashamed and behave in ways that feel false and unnatural. She also feels helpless without him. This feeling is so intense that she fears she will die if she can’t have him in her life. She is scared that he will leave her, and she is scared that she will do something that convinces him to leave.
Knapp depicts other men in the book as villains and sources of fright as well. Her academic advisor, Roger, frightens her by kissing and groping her when they have drinks at a celebratory lunch. The landlord at one of her apartments scares her by sexually harassing her. Men who stare at her breasts and catcall her on the street also frighten her because they make her feel unsafe, threatened, and dehumanized. Knapp says that fear of these men contributes to her fear of being alone, one of the first discomforts that drives Knapp to solitary drinking.
Murkiness Versus Clarity
On several occasions, Knapp mentions how drinking replaces clarity with murkiness. Drinking muddies thoughts, emotions, and memories, and it hampers the kind of clarity needed to develop insight. She says drinking “may be why [her] mid-twenties—postanorexic and increasingly liquid—are all muddy” (151). She explains that drinking prevents people from forming clear opinions of their own, which caused problems in her relationship with Julian. He sensed that she was a “muddled person who needed to grow into a strong person” (175). Knapp also realizes that to grow and gain wisdom, she needs to address her problems and insecurities with a clear mind: “[A]s long as I don’t drink, as long as I expose my doubts and fears to the clear light and refuse to drown them in liquor, I believe I’ll find my way, as a person, as part of a couple” (278). Giving up drinking gives her access to the clarity that she needs to make progress in her life and relationships.
