Drinking: A Love Story begins with Knapp comparing her alcohol addiction to a bad romance, “a deeply passionate, profoundly complex, twenty-year relationship” (xvi). She says the relationship began to unravel during a Thanksgiving-weekend incident involving her oldest friend’s young daughters (xv). Knapp makes a bad decision while intoxicated. While out for an after-dinner walk with the family, she convinces the two girls to climb on her. She then loses her balance when darting across a street. Knapp breaks the fall, injuring her leg, but the situation could have been much worse. The weight of her body could have crushed the kids.

Knapp reflects on what happened while getting stitches in the hospital’s emergency room, concluding that she put the children in jeopardy with her drunken behavior. Three months later, she quits drinking. In doing so, she starts dissolving the affair that has taken over her life and threatened to destroy nearly everything she loves.

Knapp shares some examples that show how dysfunctional her drinking became. She says that drinking became a response to nearly every situation and emotion: “I drank when I was happy and I drank when I was anxious and I drank when I was bored and I drank when I was depressed, which was often” (1-2).