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 8-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “Addiction”
Chapter 8 begins with Knapp noting how heavy, chronic drinking can damage virtually every organ in the human body. She notes how alcoholism is the leading cause of liver disease in the United States and increases the risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease, sexual dysfunction, infertility, and many other medical problems. Alcohol and violence are also linked. Experts estimate that it’s a factor in nearly half of all homicides and a third of all suicides. For these reasons, Knapp likens her love affair with drinking to playing with fire.
Knapp says the body of a normal drinker tells that normal drinker when it’s time to stop consuming alcohol. Such a drinker will usually stop drinking before alcohol begins to slur their speech or delay their reflexes in a noticeable way. People with alcoholism have a different physical makeup, she explains. Alcoholism most likely has a strong genetic component, as it tends to run in families. Brain molecules get altered when exposed to alcohol repeatedly, and this seems to cause problems for the brain’s reward system. Alcohol activates this system artificially. The neurotransmitters and proteins that create feelings of well-being change, and the brain loses its ability to create feelings of well-being without alcohol. So even if an alcoholic tells themselves that too much drinking is harmful, a less conscious part of the alcoholic mind brain pushes the alcoholic to consume alcohol when they need to feel better.
Even though the disease model of alcoholism has existed in the US since 1960, Knapp says this problem is still viewed as a personal failing much of the time. Symptoms like hangovers and tremors tend to fade, which makes them easy to ignore. Plus, many alcoholics continue to function on some level. But the notion of alcoholism as a moral shortcoming (which it was seen as by the majority of society in the 19th century)is destructive, Knapp says: “[W]e figure that drinking too much is a sign of weakness and lack of self-restraint; that it’s ‘bad’; that it can be overcome by will” (128). This leads people to spend hours analyzing the problem and talking about it, even though addressing the physical components of the disease is at least as important. Knapp concludes that “if the brain is screaming for booze, no number of revelations about underlying causes is going to counter that call” (129). Plus, Knapp notes, “there appears to be no safe way to drink again, no way to return to normal, social drinking” for the true alcoholic (129). This is why AA advocates that sober alcoholics completely abstain from drinking.
There is, however, a movement that tries to help drinkers moderate their alcohol use before it gets out of hand. Knapp has doubts about this approach because it “seems to ignore the more deeply rooted, compulsive pulls a drinker feels toward alcohol; these are needs that don’t respond well to the concept of moderation” (130). Moreover, alcoholics typically try to moderate their drinking on their own; they’re just not very good at it, Knapp says. This is why asylums used to exist for drinkers who’d hit bottom, and why hospitals used to confine drunk people with mentally ill patients. Since the 1970s, rehab centers and AA have grown to address the needs of recovering alcoholics. But these approaches are informed by the old way of doing things, Knapp says. Bill Wilson, one of the founders of AA, didn’t get the help he needed at the hospital, but he stumbled upon something that works: talking with other alcoholics in a group setting.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Substitution”
Knapp recalls a night in 1983 when she and three female friends who were also attempting sobriety admitted to each other that they were failing. Not only were they drinking, they were starving, purging, stealing, and popping pills. In other words, alcoholism often accompanies other types of addictions: “At heart all addictions are driven by the same impulses and most accomplish the same goals; you just use a different substance, or take a slightly different path, to get there” (134).
For Knapp and many other women, this path involves food. She thinks eating disorders and other food-related struggles are a sign of “self-hatred and self-sabotage,” as well as “loss of control and fear of it” (135). And she’s unsurprised that many women with eating disorders—about 25 percent, according to the Harvard University Eating Disorders Center—also have substance-abuse problems.
One of Knapp’s college friends, a woman named Janet, struggled with bulimia. She’d get stuck in cycles of overconsumption, purging, and guilt, which would sap a lot of her mental energy. Janet would spend hours plotting “what would she eat, how much, how would she get the food, where would she consume it” (136). This cycle mirrors what many alcoholics go through, Knapp posits. She also thinks a similar guilt cycle is an almost universal feature of the female experience. This conclusion is informed by Knapp’s personal experience with both anorexia and alcoholism. She says that “like drinking, anorexia was a strategy, a way of managing strong emotion,” and that she restricted her food intake with “the same zeal” she later consumed alcohol (140).
Knapp develops full-blown anorexia a year out of college, several months after her mother is diagnosed with breast cancer. Her ex-boyfriend, David, tells her he’ll come spend two months with her in Providence to lend moral support, but instead he takes a trip to Europe. Furious, Knapp goes on a “hunger strike” that is “as willful and deliberate as a carefully crafted political statement” (141). When David returns to town, she’s twenty pounds lighter and, as she later realizes, looks like a cancer patient. Knapp claims she wasn’t aware how much anger she felt toward David and how worried she felt for her mother. She was aware that starving made her feel special and powerful. It helped her feel superior to others because she was able to restrain herself, while others indulged. Anorexia gave her a goal, “something to be good at,” and “a way to literally wear whatever pain [she] felt” (141-42).Plus, anorexia gave her a way to shrink body parts that looked or felt sexual, and to distance herself from her feelings, especially feelings regarding sexuality. She could only think about food: what she’d permit herself to eat and the rituals she must follow when eating it. The foods she lets herself eat become objects of reverence.
Though Knapp’s physical transformation is hard to miss, none of her family members except her sister comment about it. This makes her angry. Knapp remarks that her hunger wasn’t having the effect she’d hoped: It wasn’t making them notice her. During the height of her anorexia, drinking provided Knapp with a “periodic push out of the isolation of starving” (145). When she moves to Boston in 1984, she is able to build a more normal relationship with food, but not without struggle. She has to learn “what functions starving serves” and how to “accomplish the same goals in better ways” (145). She becomes less isolated and more social, but with her social life comes drinking. At the time, it feels like progress. She doesn’t realize she’s traded her eating disorder for a drinking problem.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Denial”
According to Knapp, denial is such a central feature of alcoholism that people often say alcoholism is denial in AA meetings. She explains how alcoholics constantly change the rules they’ve established for their drinking because they don’t want to admit they’ve lost control. To illustrate this point, Knapp shares a story about a resident of her rehab facility. This woman is so addicted to alcohol that she stopped at a liquor store before going to the hospital to seek treatment for a miscarriage. The woman is pulled over by a cop because she is driving while intoxicated. Though this incident is humiliating, the woman feels fine the next day and continues to drink.
Knapp’s own rule-changing involves switching from one addiction to another. She recalls feeling “overcome with inertia” when she is “halfway between anorexia and alcoholism” (151). At the time, she feels profoundly unhappy and adopts bad habits such as driving drunk, with one eye shut to cope with the double vision the alcohol had caused. She also starts things that bother her and feels unable to deal with them. For instance, when she has lunch with her father, he makes sure they meet for exactly fifty minutes long, the length of a psychoanalysis appointment. Knapp wants her father to see her as a daughter rather than a patient, but she can’t fully grapple with this desire and turns to alcohol to dull the discomfort. Problems like this are too difficult to address when she’s already feeling bad, she reasons. She’ll tackle them when her situation improves. Knapp also applies this logic to drinking. “That was my favorite line: I’ll drink less when things get better,” she remarks (155).
Even when Knapp experiences flashes of awareness that her drinking is a problem, she shuts them down with alcohol. Then, when bad things happen during her drunkenness, she frames them as isolated incidents. These habits allow her to continue risky behaviors such drinking until she blacks out and waking up with no pants on, unsure what has happened, and driving while so drunk that she can’t remember where she has parked her car. The thing that worries her most isn’t that she has been raped or that she has killed someone with her drunk driving. She fears that she might have spilled a secret someone told her, which would make her seem like a person who can’t be trusted.
Chapters 8-10 Analysis
The idea that insight arrives in flashes reappears in this set of chapters. For instance, Knapp notes that once every few weeks during her battle with anorexia, she wouldn’t be able to stand the self-control and vigilance that starving herself requires. At these times, she binges on both food and alcohol. She says that these bingeing episodes were “usually preceded by some glimmer of insight into my own loneliness, some gnawing sense that my hunger was more than merely physical” (143). But instead of using this momentary insight to remedy her situation, she drowns it out, usually by drinking and telling herself that she’ll deal with her problems another day, a day when it feels more possible to do so. She also notes that twelve-step programs like AA attack this type of thinking by helping people face their problems head-on and realize that they don’t need alcohol to fuel or avoid this work.
The theme of trust emerges in this section of the book as well. Knapp can’t bear the thought of others finding her untrustworthy, for example, as the result of sharing someone else’s secret in a moment of drunkenness. This is ironic because her drinking has made her untrustworthy in numerous other ways. She can’t be trusted to drive sober or remember where she parked her car. She can’t be trusted to remember who she slept with after she gets drunk. And she certainly can’t be trusted to stick to the drink limit she’s set for the evening.
As in Chapter 2, Knapp references famous writers with drinking problems in Chapter 10. Here, she cites a description of a hangover from Kingsley Amis and an anecdote about a drunken accident that befell Ernest Hemingway. In doing so, Knapp makes herself part of a specific literary subset: authors with alcoholism. She seems to do this not only because she can relate to their struggles but because it gives her writing a sense of legitimacy. As Knapp mentions earlier in the book, she feels like she’s part of their tribe, and that by being like them, by sharing the problem of alcoholism, this makes her better able to explore certain aspects of life’s darkness. The Hemingway example is especially instrumental to her storytelling. One night, while drunk, he pulled the wrong chain in his bathroom, which brought a skylight crashing down on his head. Knapp uses this tale to segue into some of the ways her own life came crashing down due to her drinking.
