Drinking a Love Story by Caroline Knapp Essay

Drinking a love story by Caroline describes a life of an alcoholic daughter of rich parents. Excessive wealth, love and carelessness from her parents caused her to adopt life threatening habits. She later on started consuming alcohol. She indulged in alcoholism so much that her life was completely devastated. Caroline describes in details the bad outcomes of excessive consumption of alcohol. One third of alcoholics are women. Every day she consumed more and more alcohol and that was causing more damage to her life. Caroline Knapp, a psychotherapist, narrates a trajectory life of an alcoholic daughter. During Dream world stage, since her adolescence she had problems with drinking. She starts consuming alchol in her early teens and became a regular drinker by the age of sixteen. Her father was a psychoanalyst and a drinker himself who had affairs with several women. Her mother wasn’t able to give attention to her daughter as she was already sufferring from breast cancer. She was born in a prosperous family and her twin sister became a physician. However, Knapp became extremely addictive to alcohol. In disillusionment stage, all the symtptoms of alcoholism started appearing her as she approached her 20s. She also started on unrealistic sex relationship with several men. This added to her unhealthy conditon. During misery stage her thoughts and imaginations were immersed in a bottle of alcohol. A daughter of well-to-do family had a love affair with alcohol that ruined her entire life. The story narrates a true life image of an alcoholic and a warning for those who had started out habit of drinking. During her enlightment stage she sometimes realized that this habit has completely ruined her life. She struggles to find out contact with those who are even more alcoholic than her, in order to comfort her that she’s not the alone. Her parents were also alcoholics. However, she tries to come-up with this problem by improving her self-image and recovery from this state. â€Å"At the same time Meg’s story – her shyness and shame and confusion -is achingly familiar. Bad, semi-consensual drunken sex: so many women I know did this. So many still do. At least one quarter of the 17,592 students surveyed in a 1995 Harvard School of Public Health study on campus drinking said they had suffered an unwanted sexual advance as a result of drinking; that same year, a Columbia University study reported that alcohol plays a role in ninety percent of rapes on college campuses. † (Knapp) In her mid 20s she seeked help with psychotherapist to solve her problems with eating. Because of her excessive consumption of alcohol she lost her apetite, a condition called anorexia. However, duirng her treatment she kept on drinking. Regular consumption of alcohol made her very distressed and she gradually started realizing the cause of her unhappiness. During mutual respect stage, her both parents died of cancer. Loss of her parents, her father’s several comments and her carelessness while holding a child of her friend moved her to undergo an alcoholic anonymous rehabilitation program. Though she was successful as a journalist, she was unable to control her behavior, her unhealthy condition and developed distorting unwanted sex relationship with several men. She found her love affair with an alcohol as a synonymous to an unfaithful and unresponsive man, who had destroyed her life completely. Her recovery would be to end this relationship from its roots and to take a divorce from this love. Those who consume alcohol usually indulge in this habit in order to avoid facing difficulties in life. Caroline brings to their awareness that drinking is not the solution as it makes the problem worse. By drinking one cannot avoid those difficulties and problems but in fact have other severe health problems incurred. This can make their lives miserable. The story is a very good advice for drinkers about this life threatening habit. She sketches a true picture of an alcoholic daughter and its miserable outcomes on women of all age who have this habit. References Knapp, Caroline. Drinking A Love Story.