drinking: a love story

i've been reading a memoir about alcoholism: drinking: a love story by caroline knapp. i'm trying to learn more about addiction before i return to bisbee and possibly start a job working with women who are recovering from alcohol and drug addictions. today i read some striking passages--yes, about alcoholism, but also about being a woman in our society. when i read these pages earlier, i immediately wanted to share knapp's astute observations with someone else, but i was alone at the time. so instead of just reading the passage to myself, feeling moved, but moving on, i'm going to share what she has to say here on my blog. from my perspective as a listener, as a reader, it's meaningful for me to hear her experiences expressed--these feelings of insecurity, fear, discomfort, anger, awkwardness in relationship to body verbalized--and to be reminded that IT'S NOT JUST ME... to remember how often these moments occur for women and that they truly do leave lasting effects. perhaps the effects are not always physically visible, sometimes they are. but they still are there, informing who we are, how we think, how we relate to our bodies, how we relate to food (and the list goes on)...

as background info, knapp writes,

"My landlord at the time was a big, self-important realtor who lived on the third floor and used to stare at my breasts when he talked to me. A guy named Tony worked at the building as a handyman, and he'd whistle and hoot at me when I went out to my car. I had long hair at the time, almost waist length, and if I passed close enough to him, he'd grab my braid and tug at it as though the mere fact that it was long entitled him to touch it. I took up running that year, and every once in a while, when I was jogging along and some man leaned out the window of his car and whistled, I'd feel a flash of deep rage, a sensation that felt core and true but seemed to vanish as quickly as it hit" (100).

And this is the statement that really hit home:

"These may sound like small things, nonevents, but over time they accumulate and inform your sense of the landscape: your breasts get stared at enough times and the world begins to feel like an unsafe place. On some level I must have felt furious, but the fury seemed inaccessible and futile, the way it does to so many women who are taught that female rage is taboo" (100).

a couple of chapters later, she discusses in detail the struggles of most women to feel comfortable in their own bodies. she begins,

"The Harvard University Eating Disorders Center estimates that twenty-five percent of women with eating disorders also suffer from substance-abuse problems" (123).

(Note: this book was written in 1996, so 13 years later this statistic and others that she reports may be even higher.) She continues,

"Sometimes I think I know all of them, women who traded in one form of pain and obsession for another, or who danced around with both at the same time, women who've spent years struggling not just to live alone with their own thoughts but also to exist with some modicum of peace in their own bodies."

"These are women who toss around the phrase food issues a lot, as in 'I had a lot of food issues back then,' or 'My food issues are really up these days.' Anyone who's struggled with a distorted body image or hyperconsciousness of weight (and that's most women i know) understands what those words mean: they're shorthand for self-hatred and self-sabotage, for loss of control or fear of it, for all the other particularly female rages and fears that, according to the The New York Times, compel half the population to shell out an estimated $33 billion a year on diet- and weight-loss programs" (124-5).