WHY WE DRINK TOO MUCH: The Impact of Alcohol on Our Bodies and Culture, by Charles Knowles
“Excessive Drinking Rose During the Pandemic” read one 2021 headline. That I at first clocked that third word as “rosé” showed the extent of the problem.
A no-nonsense English app called Try Dry, free of the saccharine affirmations, dumb games and bids for money that characterize the American versions, has helped me cut back. Now Charles Knowles, a colorectal surgeon and professor in London, is putting the Brit in quit lit with an openhearted new book, “Why We Drink Too Much.”
Sober for a decade thanks in part to A.A. meetings, Knowles writes that he doesn’t want to bore readers with tales of his excess. But a few bubble up to the surface, in and around many worrisome charts and graphs. Like the fight with his father-in-law at his son’s christening party, held at an infamous London pub called the Blind Beggar — where the gangster Ronnie Kray fatally shot George Cornell in 1966, and outside of which William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, used to preach.
On one occasion, Knowles’s daughter’s nursery school refused to release her to him because he was so intoxicated and his wife, Annie, had to be summoned from work; on another, the child was left wondering where dinner was as he lay passed out on a couch.
His nose got broken after a “drinking altercation”; he dislocated his pinkie finger after falling off a bike; he had a George Bailey moment on the Tower Bridge; and, most distressingly, he once sat under a mango tree in a friend’s garden with a half-empty bottle of Bacardi and a five-round Smith & Wesson .38.
Unlike Denzel Washington’s pilot character in “Flight,” the author never performed under the influence. “Alas, others have,” he writes. It’s a measure of the addict’s commitment that his hospital had to remove the alcohol-based hand sanitizer outside ward entrances.
Knowles lays out methodically what alcohol does to its consumers: how some are reliant, others repelled and many more float around in a cloudy “gray area.” Reading about this is grim but grounding, like finding out that what the poets call love might just be some swirl of oxytocin and vasopressin. It pulls back the heavy velvet curtain on that old black magic. (And yet: “ I have had to pinch myself that I wasn’t having an affair with a strange man,” Annie exults of his recovery, “as it was as if aliens had come and taken my husband away, replacing him for a better version!”)
The number of acronymed syndromes here is a little overwhelming. But if the science stultifies, the intriguing memoirish parts might be persuasive.
We get peeks of Knowles’s childhood during the skinhead era in the East Midlands town of Boston, Lincolnshire, and his dispatch to a boarding school 50 miles away where he was hazed and bullied for, among other offenses, not knowing the rules of rugby. He received beatings with socks that had been stuffed with soap bars.
Coming of age in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, Knowles believes, when “the small glass of sherry at Sunday lunch” was flooded by a more expansive drinking culture, primed him for alcoholism. He had his first liter and a half of beer at 13 on a school trip to Munich and went on to join revelers half-comatose from grapefruit juice and vodka after parties thrown by a debauched drinking society at his Cambridge college.
Knowles imbibed to obliterate, being in possession of “the sort of internal filing system that has an elephantine capacity for toxic memories,” he writes. “It can feel like there is a washing machine of information going round from which my brain will selectively pull out the ‘dirty clothes’ to torture me.” There is a person here of depths that the self-help genre cannot accommodate, but how generous of him to throw out a life preserver to others rather than wallowing.
Booth called gin “the only Lethe of the miserable,” referring to the mythical river of the Greek underworld whose waters enabled forgetfulness. But alcohol is also linked, Knowles reminds us, to the more deleterious forgetfulness of cognitive decline and dementia. And to a host of other maladies, including polyneuropathy, cancer, fatty liver, coronary artery disease, impotence (a.k.a. “brewer’s droop”), psychosis and so forth.
Many choose to blow past these bummer facts and continue to tipple and calibrate. “This Dry January is dragging on a bit” is a meme I received on the 2nd of this month. Hippocrates and Plato both thought moderate amounts of wine were medicinal. And let’s not forget about the French!
But younger people are drinking less. Just as they are reading fewer books.
WHY WE DRINK TOO MUCH: The Impact of Alcohol on Our Bodies and Culture | By Charles Knowles | Celadon | 304 pp. | $28
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.
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