Summary Of Drinking By Caroline Knapp

Drinking: A love story by Caroline Knapp is a memoir of Knapp’s love story with alcohol. The novel is in told is Knapp’s point of view in which she tells the story of her downward spiral of her addictive nature. She describes how the effect alcohol had on her emotions, relationship, and thoughts. The beginning of the book explains how she became an alcoholic which further progresses to how she knew she had a problem. She was first introduced to alcohol by her father, whom she has a good relationship with as he seemed to worry about her feelings because he had related to them. In her twenties, she became anorexic. In this part of the book she relates the physical craving for alcohol is the same physical pain felt when famished. After she got help with her anorexia, she picked up drinking once again to help her cope with the feelings she was unable to deal with sober. Drinking made life easier for Knapp. Consistent throughout the book, Knapp shows signs of needing love and affection to cure her depression. She finds a man named Julien who seems to fulfill her needs. However, Julian is a man who needs his women to work for his affection. He asked her to always look presentable and Caroline need

She does this because she was misunderstood when it came to understanding her “drinking problem.” She talks about the statistics with a conversations tone about how excessive drinking cause the brain to only make dopamine when alcohol is present in your body. Your brain makes the metal connection that in order to be happy and feel good, one must drink. Alcoholism comes upon one quickly. When you find yourself drinking to feel pleasure you have crossed the line of a social drinker into an alcoholic (113- 118). She uses the cucumber-to-pickle analogy to explain this by saying, “you can try to stop a cucumber from turing into a pickle but there’s no way you can turn a pickle back into a cucumber”