Caroline Knapp
Caroline Knapp
Caroline Knappwas an American writer and columnist whose candid best-selling memoir Drinking: A Love Story recounted her 20-year battle with alcoholism. She was the daughter of noted psychiatrist Peter H. Knapp, who did groundbreaking research into psychosomatic medicine...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth8 November 1959
CountryUnited States of America
self solitude pace
I've always been drawn to solitude, felt a kind of luxurious relief in its self-generated pace and rhythms.
self order events
By definition, memoir demands a certain degree of introspection and self-disclosure: In order to fully engage a reader, the narrator has to make herself known, has to allow her own self-awareness to inform the events she describes.
self-esteem risk needs
Mastery over the body - its impulses, its needs, its size - is paramount; to lose control is to risk beauty, and to risk beauty is to risk desirability, and to risk desirability is to risk entitlement to sexuality and love and self-esteem.
self cottages substance
Cottage cheese is one of our culture's most visible symbols of self-denial; marketed honestly, it would appear in dairy cases with warning labels: this substance is self-punitive; ingest with caution.
mistake mean self
The freedom to choose...means the freedom to make mistakes, to falter and fail, to come face-to-face with your own flaws and limitations and fears and secrets, to live with the terrible uncertainty that necessarily attends the construction of a self.
add behind five hundred piece self-esteem subtract vain
These are big trade-offs for a simple piece of cake - add five hundred calories, subtract well-being, allure, and self-esteem - and the feelings behind them are anything but vain or shallow.
deal gene safe shut walked
I've always walked around with the sense that the world is not a safe place. I didn't get the spontaneous gene or the adventure one, really. After going through the day with its stresses, when I shut that door at night, I don't have to deal with anything but dinner, 'E.R.' and my bathrobe.
best horrors life seventh several time
Who has the best features? This was a little game, conducted several times and always with the same results, in seventh grade, the time when so many of life's little horrors begin.
breakfast cereal clock eat morning muffins odd oddly
I eat breakfast pretty much 'round the clock - muffins in the morning, scones for lunch, cereal at night - which may be odd but is also oddly satisfying, if only because the choice is my own.
business collective falling intake levels lunch order pray restaurant restraint women
I go to a restaurant with a group of women and pray that we can order lunch without falling into the semi-covert business of collective monitoring, in which levels of intake and restraint are aired, compared, noticed: 'What are you getting? Is that all you're having? A salad? Oh, please.'
baggy bean clothing heavy
The clothes are different: pre-dog, I used to be very finicky and self-conscious about how I looked; now I schlep around in the worst clothing - big heavy boots, baggy old sweaters, a hooded down parka from L.L. Bean that makes me look like an astronaut.
against club gained great health immediate impulse locker room toward walk
I walk into a health club locker room and feel an immediate impulse toward scrutiny, the kneejerk measuring of self against other: 'That one has great thighs, this one's gained weight, who's thin, who's fat, how do I compare?'
alone amount census certain destined figures spend time wondering
Census figures be damned: If you choose to be alone, you're destined to spend a certain amount of time wondering why.
absent acted boundary dogs fill fluidity hard human kinds lack pet roles
The kinds of roles dogs fill can be hard to come by in human relationships. We touch the dog or the pet at whim. There is a lack of self-consciousness and a fluidity to it that is absent from most human relationships. If someone acted that way to you, you'd feel claustrophobic pretty quickly. It's a boundary violation.