Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol
by Ann Dowsett Johnston
First Posted May 2014
This book still lives in my head, but ten years later I would probably dislike it less and use half the words to say it.
Structurally, I would edit out the whole whiskey/whisky thing—it adds nothing to what I’m saying and coming off the heels of Crif Dog seems super petty. Honestly, the whole west village/east village debate also seems tedious in and of itself, unless you live precisely there, which I would just three short months after finishing this piece. But even then, who cares?
I’m actually quite surprised I didn’t migrate this over to dinaburgwrites yet. Perhaps I simply lost the page in the bowels of the internet? Ah well.
One might think that, at this point, I would be inured to the charms of non-fiction subtitling: Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol has the appealing air of an in-depth sociological examination. As someone living in a predominantly female neighborhood in Manhattan—renowned for its air of “safety” over “excitement”—I was curious to find some rationale behind the observably more frequent clusters of women stumbling around on late Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings—hailing cabs and buying electrolyte-replenishing Gatorades—than groups of men. And while this anecdotal tale is completely irrelevant to any sort of methodical inquiry into the subject of women and alcohol, it is the type of digression that you should brace yourself for if you’re planning on picking up Drink.
i pulled this off of my facebook page
Simply put, the book is a personal journey of the author’s alcohol addiction propped up by brief interviews of tangential utility. Sometimes interesting facts sneak through:
Thomas Workman, with the American Institutes for Research in Washington, D.C., has worked on college drinking issues for years. “With flavored vodka, the drinking of female college students became much deadlier,” he says. “It is so easily abused. I still see quite a number of student deaths and egregious injuries and sexual assaults, ones that don’t get publicized. Women in adolescence confuse notoriety with popularity. The fear of being the girl who will sit alone in her room and not be seen is pervasive. Somewhere, our culture has told girls that they need to be recognized—invisibility is the enemy. We see this scenario over and over. We have done a terrible job of helping young women situate themselves socially.”
There is no follow-up on the scourge of flavored vodkas, no extended investigation into the topics broached by the subject. Simply another in a long line of self-contained interviews, chronologically arranged and tied to the autobiography through only a moderate relation of alcohol intake. If the next series of interviews posed pointed questions to their subjects about why flavored vodkas were so popular, adding to the thrust of a narrative rather than creating a terse, meandering platform for their subject to unburden their personal histories, the vignettes might have some impact. Instead, Drink continues to plow forward, lacking any overall thrust or direction outside of the author’s own demons; each interview is sealed off from any wider meaning, a delineated beginning and end with no cohesion to a whole. The only through-thread is the author’s own addiction, which means that although there are many brief personal statements from many interview subjects, there is little depth and no connective tissue to "women and alcohol" outside of the mere fact that the author is, in fact, both an woman and an alcoholic.
In classically misleading non-fiction subtitling, Drink is not the sociological examination it purports to be but an autobiography—one thinly spread across three hundred pages, stuffed with myopic interviews that contain little insight beyond "alcohol can be a harmful drug." Perhaps My Intimate Relationship with Alcohol would not have had the necessary eye-catching impact of The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol, but it certainly would have better informed the reader of the actual content of the book they were about to read.
That isn’t meant to negate the interesting facts that do come through from some of the interviews:
I wanted to know: why are we so oblivious to the effect advertising has on us? “Ads are so trivial and silly that people feel above them,” says Kilbourne. “And for that reason, they don’t pay conscious attention. The advertisers love it: our radar is not on. We’re not on guard; it gets into our subconscious and affects us very deeply.”
Kilbourne quotes the chairman of an ad agency saying, “If you want to get into people’s wallets, first get into their lives.”
While this all feels very apocryphal—who is the unnamed agency chairman the interviewee is quoting?—it is at least informative. But, like the abdication of any sort of follow-up investigation into the subject of flavored vodka, the topics broached in this interview are abruptly dropped; in this particular case, all traces of the scorn for targeted lifestyle advertising seems to be not only forgotten but pointedly ignored—within four pages—by the first interview after the chapter transition:
A tall girl, with glossy chestnut hair, Nivea skin, and a winsome smile, she pauses and looks away several times before she can begin to talk.
Describing someone as having Nivea skin is somehow less insidious than, say, a Captain Morgan thirst for adventure because this is a book about alcohol, not untenable standards of beauty, I guess? The carelessness keeps the pace brisk, but makes it the whole thing so shallow that it is borderline insulting. If you want to prop up a personal odyssey with quotes from others with similar experiences, that’s fine; but this is not a book about “women and alcohol.” It is about the author and her experiences as an alcoholic. This is my single biggest criticism of Drink—it feels piecemeal, bumbling onward like it has forgotten its own history after every paragraph, promising one thing while giving you another.
Drink doesn’t show me statistics or studies that show the unique obstacles women are facing: it doesn't even have an index, the functional staple of the academic, non-fiction reference tome. It hangs its hat on shallow, unsupported quotations, some of which are contain factual inaccuracies:
At twenty-eight, Julia Ritz Toffoli is the founder of Women Who Whiskey, a Manhattan-based club people by eighty-seven young women between the ages of 26 and 32. Many are recent graduate students of Columbia University, where Ritz Toffoli just earned her master’s. Now working as a program coordinator with George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, Ritz Toffoli loves what she calls New York’s speakeasy revival, and considers herself part of a cocktail renaissance. The entrance to her favorite bar—Please Don’t Tell, in Greenwich Village—is within a vintage phone booth in a hot dog store.
Unless the stairwell in Crif Dog—the obliquely referenced hot dog “store”—is about a mile longer than it feels, or the phone booth takes a page from Narnia and actually whisks the traveler into an allegory of the Christ-figure set across town, Please Don’t Tell is in the East Village, not the Village. If the conceit of a secret speakeasy was more than just marketing hoopla, maybe I could give this a pass. But Google can and will tell you, instantly, where in New York Please Don’t Tell hides. It’s less than a thirty second fact check, so telling the reader it is in Greenwich Village is simply an error of fact. Petty or not, it’s still wrong, and while you may not notice or care about the distinction unless you’ve been there, it is absolutely needless.
At least Women Who Whiskey have chosen the less contentious, more broadly applicable appellation for their fermented mash of choice—the same cannot be said for the author, who does provide some interesting facts about whisky while simultaneously undercutting any attempt at accuracy:
Scotland has indeed declared its intention to set a minimum price for a standard unit of alcohol at fifty pence—a decision backed by the medical profession. There was an immediate backlash. The policy was challenged by the European Union: backed by such wine-producing countries as France, Spain, and Italy, the EU said the minimum pricing breaches free trade. Moreover, the Scotch Whisky Association and Spirits Europe were granted judicial review of the legislation: they have many arguments, including one saying that minimum pricing would damage a valuable export industry. Whiskey is Scotland’s number one export after oil and gas.
Not to be pedantic [I was definitely being pedantic -ed from 2024], but there is considerable debate about the whys and wherefores of the internecine whisky ‘e’. I am surprised that the one time it is unambiguous—when referring to mash from Scotland—the author has chosen to say that “Whiskey is Scotland’s number one export…”. Especially because the Scotch Whisky Association is cited within the same paragraph. Technically, then, the sentence tells the reader that Scotland imports whiskey—distilled outside of its sovereign borders—and then exports it in amounts so voluminous that it becomes Scotland’s number one export after oil and gas. More likely, it is an oversight and whisky, not whiskey, was the intention. Another niggling error that could have been avoided with thirty seconds worth of Googled fact checking. It simply baffles me.
One of the format choices I do enjoy are the quotes at the start of each chapter. Even this is not without objection, however; the quote preceding the beginning of chapter six—<i>How do you denormalize getting “shitfaced”? is sourced to “University President.” It makes a great point with strong, attention-grabbing words, but if you can’t give us a better attribution than “University President”, maybe it needed to hit the cutting room floor. Or get someone willing to accept the attribution to say it during the course of the multiple dozens of interviews.
The lax detailing, the misleadingly narrow focus of alcoholism, and the disconnected nature of the numerous yet triflingly shallow interviews make this extremely personal tale—masquerading as a foray into wider culture issues—not worth the time it takes to read.