“We read to know we
are not alone.” This powerful line from William Nicholson’s play (also a
movie), Shadowlands, has stayed with me and is an integral aspect of why
I value books and reading so much. Books can transport us to new lands and adventures,
but they can also share emotional states, relationship struggles, and other
experiences that are very much part of the human condition. It can be
comforting and validating when an author's work and words reflect our own experience.
That's a long preamble to my latest blog post, but it speaks to the particular value of the book I introduce. The book is Drinking: A Love Story by the late Caroline Knapp. I can’t remember how I came upon this book: whether through a deliberate topic search or pure serendipity. I recall, however, that it was a book I sorely needed at the time.
This memoir tells the story of a successful writer/columnist who seemingly had it all. She also had a secret: an intense love affair with alcohol. Those who knew her best admittedly saw some red flags in her drinking but, for the most part, she presented a veneer of success in work and life. She came from a well-off, professional family; was a popular, high-functioning writer who put work first; had good friends and intimate relationships, and always looked fit and put-together.
But like many alcohol-infused biographies, there were transition points that took her drinking from social, to heavy and periodically problematic, to a realm where it took control of her life, priorities, and decision-making.
Knapp recounts how her
drinking escalated when her father: a complex, renowned psychiatrist (with his
own secrets, including alcoholism) was diagnosed with an inoperable brain
tumour. At that point “all bets were off…his illness opened up a well of fear
in my chest that felt bottomless, and I drank to fill it, to escape it, to numb
it.”
And eventually there was hitting bottom, which looks different for everyone. It often involves a significant negative consequence to drinking that offers someone a moment of clarity regarding the destructive situation, and can spark a strong resolution to change. What had started as a relationship with alcohol full of passion, promise, and solutions, almost imperceptibly morphed into one of betrayal, heartbreak, and regret.
Ultimately, Knapp goes to rehab and gets sober: a happy ending but she doesn’t sugar-coat the particularly tough psychological process of doing this hard work. She is equally eloquent, though, about the rewards of sobriety, even as she describes walking through the experience of losing her mother to a recurrence of cancer without the protective layer of alcohol to numb and soothe.
My personal library is stocked with drug and alcohol recovery memoirs, but this one rises to the top. It was the first to tell a story I could relate to, in writing so beautiful I would re-read passages and savour her words and their ability to so accurately capture the imperfections and emotional vulnerability we try to hide in our attempt to appear together and OK. That may sound a little over-the-top, but I think it’s one of writing’s great superpowers: to unearth something in us that frees us, comforts us, emboldens us.
I post this on May 15th, 2022 because it was on this date 15 years ago that I severed my relationship with alcohol. What had started as a way to cope with a parent’s unfathomable terminal illness, became a habitual way to take the edge off life’s inevitable stressors for many years to come. I never missed a day of work or paying a bill, and even graduated top of my graduate school class, which is why Knapp’s experience as a high-functioning alcohol misuser resonated so strongly with me. But “high-functioning” is essentially an illusion, because negative impacts to health, relationship quality, spirit, etc. still exist and accrue; it can also be a barrier to admitting there’s a problem. Because Knapp’s experience paralleled mine in some elemental ways, it had a significant influence and impact on one of my most important life decisions.
And so, I come back to my blog’s beginning, and the idea of books and reading offering us a sense that we are not alone in our challenges, aspirations, and perspectives. That sense of shared experience can be a powerful force in engendering self-acceptance and, in some cases, personal transformation.
NOTE: Six years after her 1996 memoir was published, Caroline Knapp died of lung cancer at the age of 42. As I read the obituary I felt she'd been cheated. Alcohol didn’t get her but cigarettes likely did.
