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

2/2 —trying to address it in therapy, trying to excise it with understanding, only to realize while he was dying that he'd never really found the level of peace he'd wanted, never tasted freedom from his own depression.”

1/2 “I thought about my father that morning. I thought about the sense of sorrow that had seemed to bind us for so long, that sense of deep dissatisfaction, of being slightly off so often. I thought about how he'd lived his whole life with that feeling

“I thought about Ernest Hemingway, who'd killed himself with a twelve-gauge shotgun, and about James Agee, who died of alcoholism at the age of forty five. I had a dark, heavy sense of resignation, inevitability, as though I were in a box and simply couldn't get out.”

“I would remember that moment, that glimpse of myself as a drunk young woman at a party. Not a pretty young woman, not a sophisticated young woman. A drunk, out of control.”

“My mother had lived this way, unable to leave a man who never quite left her feeling appreciated or fully loved, and my father had lived this way, torn between two relationships, saddled with chronic ambivalence, unable to wrench himself free of the complicated, duplicitous patterns he'd established.”

“My parents' house felt so loaded with illness and anger and unresolved bits of history it was hard to walk inside without feeling like you had to hold your breath. Details about my father's betrayal would emerge, erupting like volcanoes—he'd given the woman money; he'd taken her on a trip—and they'd fill the house with a bitterness you could practically taste.“

“Hitting bottom is usually something that happens internally, where no one else can see it.”

The gift of desperation: an elusive combination of despair and grace that signals to yourself that it’s time to stop drinking, time to save yourself

2/2 and lived through those moments of profound disappointment when you look into the eyes of someone you love and see that they are unable to meet every single one of your needs.”

1/2 “It never occurred to me that people like John and Andrea (who are, in fact, a very happily married couple) might have worked very hard to build the relationship they had, that they might have gone through great periods of doubt with one another, and struggled to accept each other's limits,