"It happened this I fell in love and then, because love was destroying everything I cared about, I had to fall out." So begins Caroline Knapp's searing account of her twenty-year love affair with alcohol, the "liquid armor" she used to protect herself from life's painful family tension, social insecurity, fear of intimacy, her parents' deaths. Though she was for twenty years a functioning alcoholic, few would have suspected that beneath her attractive, Ivy League veneer, this successful professional was a young woman who had to drink herself to sleep every night. She thought alcohol gave her the courage to face life. It took her twenty years to admit that drinking only made it more difficult to bear.