SOURCE: A review of Drinking: A Love Story, in People Weekly, Vol. 46, No. 1, July 1, 1996, p. 33.

[In the positive review below, Hubbard lauds Knapp's "heart-breaking honesty."]

Even as a child, Caroline Knapp liked the cocktail hour. The daughter of a stern, distant psychoanalyst and his self-contained painter-wife, she looked forward each evening to her father's first martini, when his reserve would dissolve "as though all the molecules in the room had risen up," she writes [in Drinking: A Love Story], and "rearrange themselves, settling down into a more comfortable pattern."

With a transformation like that, who wouldn't hit the bottle? But in this compelling memoir, Knapp, 37, a columnist for The Boston Phoenix, avoids assigning blame for her own anguished 20-year duet with alcoholism. Instead, she describes with heart-breaking honesty the disease's insidious stages: the early infatuation, when liquor served as a "liquid bridge" to intimacy; the downward spiral ("You...