Overcoming Demons
I’ve heard it said that a good memoir tells the reader not only what happened, but shows the writer’s journey of growth and change. To me, this is what makes a memoir worth reading. Gritty details aside (no matter how juicy they might be), I want to be more than a voyeur. I want to enter the writer’s life. And that’s exactly what happened when I read Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story and Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind. I was witness to the humanity of both of these women as they strove to overcome their demons to lead productive lives. And added to that, both books were compulsive reads.
In Drinking: A Love Story Caroline Knapp, who passed away in 2002, gave us a book that should become a classic, next to Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s [End Page 169] Life. It is much more than a memoir of her alcoholism and her recovery. Ms. Knapp is an honest, funny, and psychologically savvy storyteller who pulls the reader into all the issues of her life—romance, loneliness, family, body image—issues that many single women and men can relate to.
In evocative prose and a narrative that weaves seamlessly back and forth in time, Knapp takes the reader on a ride. “Alcohol travels through families like water over a landscape, sometimes in torrents, sometimes in trickles . . . ,” she writes, showing us, too, the lives of alcoholics she has met along the way; buddies like Helena, who completed her PhD while drinking, and AA friends like Abby, who found her brother dead of carbon-monoxide poisoning when she was 15.
From deep inside the liquor bottle (“the distinct glug-glug of booze pouring into a glass”) through her own family history (“the martini seemed to take some core stiffness out of him [her father],” and day-to-day life (“Beneath my own witty, professional façade were oceans of fear, whole rivers of self-doubt”), Knapp teaches us how one can fall in love with a drink, stick around with this most ruthless and seductive lover, and ultimately walk away.
Knapp’s AA experiences and her knowledge of alcoholism and addiction round out this book, making it a memoir with a road map to recovery—a must read for professionals in the field and anyone who has been at the mercy of their own, or a loved one’s, self-destructive behavior. This book is also for anyone who appreciates true stories that are self-revelatory and very close to the bone.
In An Unquiet Mind Kay Redfield Jamison tells us, “People go mad in idiosyncratic ways. Perhaps it was not surprising that, as a meteorologist’s daughter, I found myself in that glorious illusion of high summer days, gliding, flying, now and again lurching through cloud banks and ethers, past stars, and across fields of ice crystals.” In this book, which is one part memoir and one part an expert’s view into manic-depressive illness, Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Hospital, reveals her struggles with the extreme highs and lows of this mood disorder.
In a warm, conversational tone, she takes readers from her “first sustained wave of mania . . .” and then plunges them into the depths of her [End Page 170] illness. “At one point I bought a gun,” she writes, “but, in a transient wave of rational thought, I told my psychiatrist; reluctantly, I got rid of it.” This leads into a startling scene where she tries to kill herself with an overdose of lithium—an event she terms “poetic in its full-circledness.”
Exploring her childhood through young adulthood, Jamison touches lightly on her relationships with her father and sister, who were also the victims of moods, and her mother and...
