Drinking : A Love Story

A powerful, brave, and moving memoir of one  woman's struggle with alcoholism, a disease that  affects fifteen million Americans each  year."It happened this way: I fell in love  and then, because love was destroying everything I  cared about, I had to fall out." So begins  Caroline Knapp's searing account of her twenty-year  love affair with alcohol, the "liquid armor"  she used to protect herself from life's painful  realities: family tension, social insecurity, fear of  intimacy, her parents' deaths. Though she was for  twenty years a functioning alcoholic, few would  have suspected that beneath her attractive, Ivy  League veneer, this successful professional was a  young woman who had to drink herself to sleep every  night. She thought alcohol gave her the courage to  face life. It took her twenty years to admit that  drinking only made it more difficult to  bear.Written with warmth, candor, and wisdom, here  is one woman's story of addiction and recovery--a  story that begins in despair and loneliness, but  ends with the hope that within each of us lies the  strength to survive in the world without  anesthesia.