SOURCE: "Hitting Bottom," in The New York Times Book Review, June 2, 1996, p. 34.

[Gordon is an American author and editor. In the excerpt below, she offers a negative assessment of Drinking: A Love Story.]

Caroline Knapp, a journalist from a well-to-do Massachusetts family,… believes that her alcoholism is partly inherited, but in Drinking: A Love Story she nonetheless settles the score with her now-deceased parents. Ms. Knapp, a magna cum laude graduate of Brown who uses frequent literary references, describes her household as "an Updike family, a Cheever clan." Her cold and remote father, a noted Cambridge psychoanalyst, had a long-running affair; her mother was so preoccupied with her own long battle against breast cancer that she hardly noticed her daughter's starving-for-attention anorexia. Ms. Knapp's twin sister responded to the family dynamics by becoming a doctor, while the author retreated into drink.

Ms. Knapp was inspired to sober up...