SOURCE: "Her Time in a Bottle: Caroline Knapp's Memoir Caroline Knapp

[In the following essay, Knapp discusses with Sege why she wrote Drinking: A Love Story and details her experiences as an alcoholic.]

Honestly, can you imagine a man describing his alcoholism like this?

"It happened this way: I fell in love and then, because the love was ruining everything I cared about, I had to fall out."

Well, that is how writer Caroline Knapp opens her memoir, titled, femininely enough, Drinking: A Love Story.

The Boston Phoenix columnist, who is 36, had her first drink as a young teenager, 13 or 14 years old, and her last a little more than two years ago. In those intervening years she graduated magna cum laude from Brown University and has worked as a journalist. She never wrote drunk, but...