Madeline’s Reviews > Drinking: A Love Story > Status Update

2/2 “Right," I said. "Or that you'd just had your period."
"Or that you were ovulating."
"Or that you hadn't had enough sleep, or enough to eat."
"Or that the moon was full."

1/2 A lot of us blamed it on hormones, which seemed like a rational enough explanation. My friend Abby remembers this clearly. "Oh, right," she said to me one afternoon, over coffee. "You'd get really drunk one night, inexplicably drunk, and you'd blame it on the fact that you were about to get your period."

The worst was wondering what I'd said, what confidences I might have broken, what evil tidbit I might have passed along to someone about a mutual friend, what self-aggrandizing comment I might have tossed off. Sometimes when I got drunk I could feel my own sober rules of social conduct just melt away, hear a little voice in my head say, No: don't start talking about that, and then go ahead and talk about it anyway.

“As happens with most addictions, life took on a blank sameness, each day rituålized and invariable, barely distinguishable from the day before.”

That morning, lying in bed with a hangover, it occurred to me that I'd been out with friends all evening and hadn't really made eye contact with any of them, hadn't had a moment of conversation that felt genuine or connected.
The realization was small, a little flash, but it would stick with me, & return to me sometimes, a wave of awareness that made something in my stomach feel heavy, like Id swallowed a stone.

“Booze: the liquid security blanket; the substance that muffles emptiness and anger like a cold snow.”

“I kept writing about my need for a "sense of purpose in my life" and I believed-or hoped-that this feeling would simply arrive, descend from above in the form of the right career or the right set of friends or the right relationship.
I lived by the words if only and I'd continue to do so for a decade.”

1/2 “These tasks terrified me—l felt so inadequate and small inside, so afraid of failing-and I hadn't checked off any-thing. I remember sitting there feeling paralyzed and passive and full of self-loathing and by six o'clock or so, telling myself I needed some fresh air,

“Alcoholic drinking is by nature solitary drinking, drinking whose true nature is concealed from the outside world and, in some respects, from the drinker as well. You think you're drinking to have fun, to be sociable or more relaxed.
But you're also drinking to shut down, to retreat.”

“But mostly I remember looking at him with a feeling I'd had since childhood: that he held something dark and conflicted and unknowable inside, something I shared but couldn't yet put words to; that he'd remain a mystery to me until he died.”

- on her father