Knapp, 36, drank frantically for 20 years. An editor and columnist at The Boston Phoenix, she would go out for a drink after work with her colleagues and just keep drinking- through dinner, and all evening. At dinner parties. she watched obsessively as the level of wine receded in the bottle on the table: would there be enough? But she never missed a deadline. “The phrase is high-functioning alcoholic,” she writes. “Smooth and ordered on the outside; roiling and chaotic and desperately secretive underneath, but not noticeably so, never noticeably so.” But inevitably her addiction began to show, first to others-the blackouts, the incoherent phone calls -and finally to herself. At Thanksgiving 1993, she was so drunk while roughhousing with a friend’s two children that she nearly killed one of them. That brush with horror woke her up. Three months later she checked into a rehab center, and today she remains sober, with the help of AA.
This remarkable book is far more than an addiction-and-recovery tale. Knapp doesn’t see herself as a victim, and she refuses to blame anyone else for her problems, not even her parents. Instead she probes her past and reflects on the shards of experience she uncovers without a trace of the blinkered self-absorption that makes so many memoirs of troubled lives so irritating. The more she learns about her father, in particular-his tormented private life, with a longtime mistress, his utter dependence on those civilized martinis-the more she understands the pattern of her own life and relationships.
Knapp, now a freelance writer living in Cambridge, is also the author of “Alice K.’s Guide to Life,” a collection of her very smart and funny Phoenix columns. She is a rare writer, with a sophisticated, beautifully controlled style. “Drinking” not only describes a triumph; it is one.
