Drinking: A Love Story

sitting there drunk, I felt none of that; instead, I had a sense of something that felt new and exciting, something like rebellion, as though the door to a new version of me, a nonintellectual, nonanalytical version, was opening before me.

There was a fuck-you element to it: a feeling of fuck you, I am going to get what I want, even if I don’t believe I deserve it.

That, of course, is how an alcoholic starts not to notice it. Just this one time. That’s how you put it to yourself: I’ll just do it this one time, the same way a jealous woman might pick up the phone at midnight to see if her lover is home, or cruise slowly past his house to check his lights, promising herself that this is the last time. I know th

“Insight,” he said, “is almost always a rearrangement of fact.”

To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek; in the bottle, you find.

I didn’t see him again, or even talk to him again, but from that point on, I could hate him, instead of merely fear him.

very few people who drink alcoholically can learn to feel like powerful players in their own lives; all the strength comes out of a bottle.

I didn’t know how to be real, how to tell the truth: that was the heart of the matter. My whole sense of reality was tied into the deception, built into the façades.

self-conscious bravado.