About this title: What makes Knapp''s account fascinating is her ruthless dissection of a picture-perfect middle-class family, her candid analysis of her high functioning journalistic career, and a weird elegy for the 1980s.'
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Delta
Date Published: 1996
ISBN-13:9780385315548ISBN:0385315546
Description: Fair. No dust jacket as issued. Wear to edges of soft cover. Page taning from age. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 304 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Very Good. Page corners and cover curled. Slight shelf wear. GoodwillnyBooks is committed to providing each customer with the highest standard of customer service. You may return new items within 30 days of delivery for a full refund. read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Delta Books
Date Published: 1997
ISBN-13:9780385315548ISBN:0385315546
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Cover shows light wear at edges and corners, spine uncreased, four words written on back flyleaf, pages only lightly tanned. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 304 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Very Good. 0385315546 light shelf wear / edge wear cover / pages light discoloration around edges//"Buy with Confidence-Satisfaction Guaranteed! Customer Service Makes All the Difference. " read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: DIAL PRESS
Date Published: 1996
ISBN-13:9780385315517ISBN:0385315511
Description: Fine in very good dust jacket. THIS USED HARDCOVER EDITION CAME FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION. BOOK IS IN NEAR NEW LIKE CONDITION. DUST JACKET HAS SOME EDGE AND CORNER WEAR. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Quartet Books
Date Published: 1997-08-01
ISBN-13:9780704380509ISBN:0704380501
Description: Good. Good title in good condition. Pages are clean and tight. Covers show some shelf wear and bumping. Satisfaction guaranteed. If item not as described, return for refund of purchase price. read more
Description: New. 0385315546 Cover has very little shelf wear. No spine seams. No remainder mark. Pages are clean with no markings, no creases and no dog-ears. Trade Paperback. read more
Description: Good. 0385315546 Softcover book is in good condition, no spine creases, moderate shelf wear, some underlining on about 2 dozen pages. Shop & Save With US. read more
"Well, what can I say about this book. It was juicy, it was very life-affirming. It reaffirmed my pride and certainty about my choices to stop drinking. I wanted to climb up a high building and shout some passages from the rooftops. It had me revelling in the nature of my brain chemisty, genetics, emotions, and fears.
The biggest reverberation for me was when the narrator pointed out it didn't matter how she got to where she was, what matters is that she start making intelligent and consistent cerebral connections, hence learning from her own mistakes, by not constantly being out of it. That the very pain we use alchohol to escape from is perpetuated by being drunk all the time. Go figure right? but to an alcoholic like myself that was a completely invisible truth. I wish there was a way to really know that truth BEFORE one quits drinking and not after.
Still she ackknowleges how much alchohol helps the modern woman in being temporarily comfortable with her sexuality, in being confrontational about her needs, in letting her fears and passions and emotions get some air. The reasons we drink are generally our big obstacles when we quit, but overcoming these obstacles through hard work leads to self esteem, as opposed to the shame and regret I'm used to."
"Caroline Knapp started drinking when she was 14, and spent almost 20 years as an alcoholic. Throughout the 1980s she maintained a good front, holding down a high-pressure job at the Boston Phoenix and keeping her addiction under wraps. Much of the time she managed to hide it even from herself: "You know and you don't know. You know and you won't know, and as long as the outsides of your life remain intact -- your job and your professional persona -- it's very hard to accept that the insides, the pieces of you that have to do with integrity and self-esteem, are slowly rotting away." This acceptance didn't come to Knapp until the early 1990s, when she finally entered a rehab program. Drinking, then, is a tale of recovery, with the emphasis on Before rather than After. When Knapp sticks to her own story, her writing is lucid and uncontaminated by self-pity. Her account of the way that alcohol "travels through families like water over a landscape" convinces us by its very specificity. Often, however, Knapp is unsure of whether she wants to write a literary memoir or a more general discussion of alcoholism. Over and over she interrupts herself to splice in statistics and vignettes she's collected from other drinkers, and while she delivers this stuff with requisite professionalism, it robs the book of its focus. Her story, she seems to suggest, approximates those of the other 15 million alcoholics in America. But approximations are exactly what we don't want in (as Knapp herself calls it) a love story."
"There are no miracles in this book, only work. It's about the hard work an alcoholic puts themself through in order to continue a lifestyle they know they shouldn't. It's about the harder work they have to go through to leave that lifestyle behind. And it's about the hardest work of all...living a life. Just living it, honestly, without giving in to all the things that make you feel like you won't ever manage to quite live it right.
You say: Help. And the amazing thing is, you find it. Page 245
I've had an old hardcover copy of the book that I bought from the Friends of the Ferguson Library (Stamford, CT) about a decade ago. I'd enjoyed Caroline Knapp's columns in the Boston Phoenix and wanted to learn about what she'd been through. It sat on shelves, in boxes, in piles, mostly untouched all those years. Then I took it with me on a group vacation that I didn't want to go on, and read the whole thing on a porch overlooking mountains, valleys, lakes and farmhouses.
I'm not an alcoholic...not even close. I don't live under the spectre of cancer, or anorexia, or an emotionally difficult childhood. But I needed to read this book very much. And now, a little after Midnight, I'm taking it out to the common area of my apartment building to leave it on a communal shelf, in the hopes that someone else who needs to read it will pick it up."
"Having already read this book by the time I got to read Jim Frey's account, (before Oprah recommended it), I felt I really had an idea of what 'it' was really like to be in the midst of an addiction. I knew Jim's account was far-fetched, for instance, but it didn't bother me because I thought it was over-the-top far-fetched so very clear that he embellished and it didn't bother me - it was still a good book. But that's because Caroline was so clear. Caroline was an amazing writer. You were right there with her. I've read essays of hers and I have thoroughly enjoyed every one. She was a talent who was silenced way too soon. This is a MUST READ!"
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