[Gordon is an American author and editor. In the excerpt below, she offers a negative assessment of Drinking: A Love Story.]

Caroline Knapp, a journalist from a well-to-do Massachusetts family,… believes that her alcoholism is partly inherited, but in Drinking: A Love Story she nonetheless settles the score with her now-deceased parents. Ms. Knapp, a magna cum laude graduate of Brown who uses frequent literary references, describes her household as "an Updike family, a Cheever clan." Her cold and remote father, a noted Cambridge psychoanalyst, had a long-running affair; her mother was so preoccupied with her own long battle against breast cancer that she hardly noticed her daughter's starving-for-attention anorexia. Ms. Knapp's twin sister responded to the family dynamics by becoming a doctor, while the author retreated into drink.

Ms. Knapp was inspired to sober up and write by Pete Hamill's memoir, A Drinking Life. But while she can be a talented stylist, she hasn't recognized one basic fact: other people's hangovers are boring. Her book rambles, and too many stories of fellow drinkers begin, annoyingly: "A guy I know named William," or "A drinker I know named Mitch." The reader is grateful that Ms. Knapp is no longer careering drunk in her car through Boston, hopeful that her recovery will last and curious to see how she does tackling a topic larger than herself.