Drinking: A Love Story

Knapp used to think alcoholism didn’t make sense in a family like hers. As she understood it, alcoholics came from families that were more chaotic than her own:

There was always an undercurrent of moral failing in the stories I heard about alcoholics: they were unstable, unwell, irresponsible, and if they were parents, they tore through the lives of their children like tornadoes, drinking and divorcing, screaming and raging (29).

Her friend, Abby, a fellow AA attendee, came from a chaotic environment like this, complete with a schizophrenic brother who committed suicide. Knapp’s family history isn’t nearly as dramatic, and she is a “nice, quiet alcoholic” (31). Though she started getting drunk at age 14, she thought she was in control because that’s something she and her family members were good at: keeping things calm and predictable. She concludes that even if your family lacks drama, it isn’t safe from the disease of alcoholism. In fact, drinking problems are more likely to sneak up on people who don’t fit the typical profile of an alcoholic.

As Knapp reflects on her family dynamic, she gains insight into her own alcoholism. Her relationship with her father plays an important role. She describes him as tall, intellectual, and intimidating. Knapp says she grew up “scared of him, not because he was mean or violent but because he was anxious and sad himself and because he had a kind of intensity that made you feel he could see right through you” (32-33).

In his presence, she feels exposed. He also has a tendency to ask probing questions, likely because he is so committed to his work as a psychoanalyst and psychosomatic researcher at Boston University Medical School. Knapp describes his manner as investigative and clinical, with an “analytic intensity tempered by a vague detachment” (33). This would make Knapp feel deeply connected to him while also feeling profoundly misunderstood. She recalls being terrified to spend twenty minutes alone in a car with him when she was a teenager, mainly because this probing made her feel trapped and unbearably vulnerable. Feeling threatened in this way led her to withhold information and mislead him; she began a pattern of avoiding honesty and openness. Despite this profound discomfort, she and her father have a special relationship, a kinship that stems from their “shared darkness, a seed of sadness he wanted to watch over” (33). She loves him dearly but knows he “got in too deep, and that left me with the feeling of being a specimen instead of a daughter, something to be investigated and shaped instead of just loved, just simply loved” (36).

When Knapp drank around her father, she felt protected and more worthy of his attention. The alcohol “diluted some of the distance and confusion and reserve” (38). Knapp’s father was also fond of alcohol; drinking martinis was his nightly ritual. Knapp had no idea how addicted to liquor he was until late in his life. Knapp recalls how his evening martinis would bring about warmth and connection that were often lacking in her family home, a place characterized by vague hints of anxiety and sadness, few indulgences, and even fewer declarations of love. Knapp describes her parents as generous but undemonstrative, like the families in novels by John Cheever and John Updike. “You rarely got kissed back,” she says. “Instead, you got calm and ritual and clear priorities” (42). Knapp recalls that her father would become more emotionally available to her mother once he’d had a few drinks, and his still exterior would soften a bit. He’s also the person who introduces Knapp to several types of alcohol. She recalls how he ordered her a wine after her senior year of high school, and how she melted into a feeling of safety and contentment while drinking it. The discomfort that defined her interactions with her father was “replaced by something that felt like a kind of love” (40).

Knapp grows up feeling that she is not supposed to want anything frivolous because this seems counter to her family’s values and simple, sensible tastes. She hardly ever hears her parents fight, so she assumes that they rarely have conflicts. There are no tangible expressions of anger or lust, either. The most salient feeling is anxiety. Knapp remembers having dreams about the kitchen floor being about to collapse and about being unable to dial the right numbers on the telephone. These dreams left her feeling on edge and in danger: “At the time, I couldn’t explain those feelings, the anxiety and the sense of disconnection; they certainly didn’t stem from anything you could see by looking” (41). She also remembers her mother having many headaches and her father making many one-sentence proclamations that were supposed to contain some essential truth about the world. One of these proclamations was that Knapp felt like an outsider in the family. He said this when she was 14 or 15 and trying to figure out who she was. She says that over time, she couldn’t tell if his proclamations were “statements of fact or allusions that became fact because he prompted them” (45).

Knapp eventually learns that her family has secrets. One secret is that her father has had a drinking problem for a long time. He was arrested twice for drunk driving and had a raging hangover at his interview for Harvard Medical School. Another secret is that her father had another wife and family before meeting Knapp’s mother. His ex-wife, Shelby, was also an alcoholic: “We all believed, I think, that my father had left chaos and illness behind when he left Shelby, exchanging those qualities for my mother’s goodness” (48).

Wicky, one of the children from the first marriage, was born with severe disabilities, including blindness, emotional problems, and intellectual limitations. Wicky lived with her parents during the first two years of their marriage and was a constant source of strain. Knapp’s mother was tasked with most of his daily care, but he was simply too difficult to control. Knapp’s father “couldn’t admit how far beyond help Wicky really was,” and her mother felt utterly helpless, especially when Wicky resorted to physical violence with her (49). Wicky is eventually sent away to a series of residential programs when Knapp’s mother becomes pregnant, but he was “always there in the background” (48). Though Knapp saw him seldom as a child, she remembers how he would rock back and forth constantly, tugging his ears. It unnerved her, in part because it was so uncontrollable. According to Knapp, Wicky was “the first tangible sign of trouble from my father’s past, of baggage brought and left, like the abandoned child, at her feet” (50).Knapp worries that if she ever becomes pregnant, the baby might turn out like Wicky. When he dies, she learns that he most likely had fetal alcohol syndrome.

Though Knapp feels some relief when Wicky passes away suddenly, she is not prepared when her father dies from a long illness. His illness scares her and she drinks to escape it. Further, her drinking becomes so important that it may have prevented her from reaching her father’s side before he died. She rushed to see him when she heard he was close to the end but arrived too late—and intoxicated.

When Knapp is 29, and around the time Wicky dies, she starts taking self-quizzes about drug and alcohol abuse. These tests show her that she drinks more when she is under stress, but she wishes they had asked her more pointed questions, such as, “Are you driven by a feeling of hunger and need?” (56). Knapp argues that “enough” is “a foreign word to an alcoholic” because there is “never enough” (57). The hunger for relief, comfort, and distraction never ends. If anything, it grows stronger over time. This is especially dangerous because alcoholics don’t know how to stop consuming the thing they crave, she says. Sometimes it seemed as if she was getting drunk against her will. “I couldn’t account for it, couldn’t explain it, couldn’t even rationalize it, although I struggled mightily to,” she remarks, noting that there’s no “enough” for an alcoholic because “the alcoholic’s body simply responds differently to liquor than a nonalcoholic’s” (58).

Though Knapp acknowledges that alcoholism is a physical disease, she emphasizes that it has strong psychological and emotional components. This includes a fear of being without the figurative armor liquor provides. Knapp says this fear and neediness can lead to a “grabbiness” that reflects “a compulsion to latch on to something outside yourself in order to assuage some deep discomfort” (58-59). Simply being in alcohol’s presence brings about this response because it activates deep feelings of need and longing. Sometimes this type of hunger is so strong that it’s impossible to focus on anything else. Knapp knows this hunger from personal experience but suspects that most alcoholics feel it long before imbibing their first drinks. It’s a universal hunger, she says, one that “cuts across all backgrounds, all socioeconomic lines, all ages and sexes and races” (60). However, a person’s culture can influence how this need gets expressed. Knapp argues that many aspects of American culture make this struggle overwhelming for people predisposed to alcoholism:

The search for a fix, for a ready solution to what ails, has become a uniquely American undertaking, an ingrained part of consumer culture, as prevalent as the nearest diet workshop or plastic surgeon […] In some ways alcoholism is the perfect late twentieth-century expression of that particular brand of searching, an extreme expression of the way so many of us are taught to confront deep yearnings (60).

There’s a strong desire to fill up the emptiness immediately, rather than learning to tolerate it for any period of time.

Knapp argues that even when people give up drinking, they are often still searching for a silver bullet to their problems. This searching leads many alcoholics to develop other addictions. Knapp recalls how she felt as a young child, when she learned how to rock back and forth. She rocked for years, every day, sometimes for hours. She says this was her first addiction, providing relief as it whisked her mind away from the things that troubled her.