Battling Drunkenness Gripping Personal Accounts Detail The All-Consuming Power That Alcohol Held Over Two Women

Women, as a rule, aren’t good at ignoring things. This probably has to do with the way we grow up: all those years of paying attention to the cycles of our own bodies. I predict that scientists will soon find the link between estrogen and the strong drive to copy over all our friends’ birthdays into each year’s calendar book.

Women who are alcoholics are the exception.

Being a drunk pretty much demands that life’s difficulties, from minor to massive, be pushed aside. Overlook the lies routinely told to a partner, boss or doctor. Forget the new shoes ruined by vomiting on them after a party. Never mind the cash, the cars and the friendships squandered or wrecked. These are not easy things to ignore, particularly for those of us who go through life paying attention to endless details, from breast lumps to birthdays. But an alcoholic can do it.

After 20 years of alcohol abuse, author Caroline Knapp quit drinking. She gathered up the dozens upon dozens of things that are part of being an alcoholic and stopped ignoring them. She put them all in a very fine book, called “Drinking: A Love Story” (The Dial Press, 1996; $22.95).

Another woman, Terry McGovern, also harvested the details of her alcoholism, seeding articulate personal journals and letters with them year after year. But McGovern’s addiction killed her, leaving her writings to be woven into the raw and loving book by her father, former Sen. George McGovern: “Terry: My Daughter’s Life-and-Death Struggle with Alcoholism” (Villard Books, 1996; $21).

There’s a dichotomy to tales told by alcoholics - an endless number of stories, but all with the very same punch line: Alcohol made my life unmanageable. Even when the life is that of a well-educated, attractive, uppermiddle-class woman with intelligent, concerned parents.

How does a young woman with all these advantages become a drunk?

Knapp and McGovern answer the question the same way: Like a lot of people, the young woman finds that drinking alcohol helps her “fit in” - to a family of overachievers or a demanding college program, for instance. Drinking can “medicate” depression, smooth the way in social situations, allow her to feel desirable and to more easily be sexually intimate.

But in her case, something is terribly wrong; the panacea becomes poison. Instead of abandoning alcohol, she increases its use, and instead of fitting in, she is more of an outsider than ever.

Her health, work or school suffers. The Great Relationship Lubricant doesn’t work anymore. She drives away the people she most cares about.

She may kill someone while driving drunk. She may kill herself in any number of ways, some faster than others.

She has a disease: alcoholism.

Reading these books back-to-back - written by one woman now celebrating two years of sobriety and another woman who lost her life after years of doing battle - makes very real the different ways the disease can take hold.

Terry McGovern’s parents knew their bright and charming middle daughter was an alcoholic. Beginning in her teens and continuing until her death at age 45, they helped her into treatment, paying for years of rehab programs, hospitalizations and therapy. Through her father’s campaigns for the U.S. Senate and the presidency, the family quietly supported Terry’s repeated efforts to get an education, work and start a family of her own.

At one point she stayed sober for eight years before returning to alcohol and marijuana use. Her life ended when she staggered out of a Madison, Wis., bar on a December night in 1994, collapsed and froze to death.

Year after year, Terry wrote journal entries about the fight to understand her need to drink as a way to cover up the bleak landscape she saw around her: “Depression is with me today. I’m so prone to it … I seem to need to suffer and be sad - there is a grief in me that I must unleash and let go of. …”

Most poignant in McGovern’s book is his daughter’s relentless honesty. Within hours of completing one of her many treatment programs, Terry McGovern headed for a bar and drank until she passed out. Her journal entry: “Evicted from apartment - got drunk - spent night with 3 white men and one black - made a point of telling them all who my dad was so they wouldn’t think I was just a drunk and a loser.”

In Carolyn Knapp’s case, the disease wore a convincing disguise.

“Nobody would have known from looking,” writes Knapp, a contributing editor to several magazines and popular columnist for the Boston Phoenix. What they would have seen was a neatly dressed woman in her early 30s seated at a perfectly organized desk looking totally in control of her life.

When she finally went off to an alcohol-rehabilitation program, Knapp told co-workers she was going to a spa.

“No one had any reason not to believe me. I hid it that well. Most high-functioning alcoholics do.”

This was a woman who was by then starting her days with the dry heaves, who shook when she went without a drink for too many hours, and told an astounding number of lies to keep two love affairs going, one with an emotionally abusive man.

“… Part of what keeps us going, part of what allows us to ignore the fact that we’re drunk every night and hung over every morning, is that we’re so very different from the popular definition of a ‘real’ drunk,” she writes.

The authors of both books discovered, to their pain, that “real drunks” sometimes do come from nice, supportive families, or look completely in control of their stylish and sophisticated existence.

From here, the books take different paths. McGovern’s story recalls much of his daughter’s Herculean struggle against her alcoholism, but it is more the memoir of a parent in deep mourning over the loss of his child.

Knapp’s first-person account delves into one of the most intriguing aspects of alcoholic behavior: the incredible amount of energy expended to hang on to a habit that was tearing her apart.

She adroitly likens this refusal to let go of booze to an out-of-control love affair.

“Anyone who’s ever shifted from general affection and enthusiasm for a lover to outright obsession knows what I mean: The relationship is just there, occupying a small corner of your heart, and then you wake up one morning and some indefinable tide has turned forever and you can’t go back. You need it; it’s a central part of who you are.”

Whether it is Knapp writing about these experiences or McGovern chronicling his daughter’s struggle, both books are emotional walks off the plank. Reading one or the other necessitates setting the book down every few pages and taking a deep breath.

Coming to terms with one’s own alcoholism, or that of a loved one, is tough. Talking it through with others in a 12-step program or counseling is still another level.

But writing it down and then sending thousands of copies of it out into the world is an enormous risk.

Even a professional writer and a politician accustomed to being in the spotlight struggle with their own revelations.

Preparing for a series of readings this month in her hometown of Cambridge, Mass., Knapp says she is more than a little ambivalent about public appearances.

“I might as well be stripped naked and sent down Boston’s main streets on a float,” was the way she summed it up in a recent interview.

McGovern says he questioned his book almost every step of the way. First was the decision to read his daughter’s journals.

“I couldn’t do it right after she died,” he said. “I not only had my own doubts, my wife and oldest daughter were firmly against anyone reading them - or writing about them.”

Eventually, he says, they all came to agree that the book was a good idea.

“At times, when I first started it, I thought it might never be published,” he said. “As I moved along, I was so impressed by Terry’s insights, sensitivity and her perception that I thought it was a story that couldn’t be kept secret.”