Drinking: A Love Story

"Although I’m a fan of this book, if I’d based my selection purely on literary merit, in all honesty I’d have chosen instead Jerry Stahl’s Permanent Midnight or Amy Liptrot ’s The Outrun , both of which are more verbally and formally original. But I think Knapp deserves a place in any overall consideration of addiction memoir as a form, for a number of reasons. It’s not only a landmark in the history of addiction memoir, but pretty much its Platonic ideal. Before her book was published in 1997, the memoir boom had produced a number of accounts of addiction with strikingly similar features. You could argue that Drinking: A Love Story played a key role in turning those accidental similarities into formal conventions by drawing them together, executing them flawlessly and, as a major bestseller, making them familiar to many readers. If you wanted to play the slightly arbitrary game of identifying the moment the addiction memoir came into being as a form, I think you could plausibly claim that it was with this book. And there’s another reason why, in a sense, Knapp’s book can be seen as a “better” addiction memoir than other, more artistically original, ones. As I’ve said, addiction memoirs serve a utilitarian purpose for many readers, who come to them for encouragement or instruction. A writer like Tove Ditlevsen would undoubtedly have considered the idea of providing therapy for the reader pure sacrilege, an abandonment of art’s unqualified commitment to the truth—and you’d never give Dependency to someone in their early days of rehab, desperate for hope. Meanwhile Knapp’s book—as well as being very good—could benefit anyone attempting to make sense of their relationship with substances. And without being dogmatic, she’s not above dispensing hopeful little maxims: Early recovery has the quality of vigorous exercise, as though each repetition of a painful moment… serves to build up emotional muscle. The book tells the story of how Knapp—a successful magazine journalist and author—hid her alcoholism, and its devastating consequences, for many years. “I fell in love,” she says, “and then, because the love was ruining everything I cared about, I had to fall out.” It’s as intelligent and articulate about the insidious nature of addiction as it is, later, about the trials and joys of recovery. Knapp relates her story in a prose that’s a model of lucidity and understated style. In a way, the book isn’t unlike how she describes her life as a high-functioning alcoholic: “Smooth and ordered” on the outside; “roiling and chaotic” underneath. There are no literary fireworks here: just a finely crafted story told by someone whose insight is all the more worth hearing for the high price she had to pay for it. In short, I do agree. I know it’s true from introspection, and from spending time around other addicts, whether using or in recovery. And, compared with the people of Thomas De Quincey’s era, we know quite a lot about the aetiology of addiction: we can read books on the psychology of addiction like Gabor Mate’s superb In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts (2010), which elucidates the now conclusive scientific evidence for its connection with childhood trauma. But before science caught up, literature had shown a profound understanding of the psychology of addiction. Acute portrayals of the condition appear in Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler , Jean Rhys’s novels and Raymond Carver’s stories, to name just a few. But it’s depictions of the full life cycle of addiction–often in serial works like Ditlevsen’s, Mary Karr’s and Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose books –that most clearly reveal the truth: that it’s not a moral defect or a random miswiring of the brain, but an individual’s compulsive attempt to blot out suffering carried over from the past. If calling addiction a ‘spiritual’ problem is supposed to prescribe submission to a supernatural ‘higher power’ as a formula for recovery, it’s not for me – though I know the 12-step philosophy works for many people. But, more broadly defined, don’t mind the word ‘spiritual’: my own story, where heroin addiction follows close on the heels of a teenage loss of faith, seems to illustrate how addiction can be a kind of spiritual search, a seeking after meaning or transcendence. And it’s interesting that the Latin root of the word ‘addict’ is related to the word ‘devotion.’"