The High Life From the Bottom of a Bottle : MEMOIR : DRINKING: A Love Story,<i> By Caroline Knapp (The Dial Press: $22.95; 258 pp.)</i>

A love story dances on water. The music moves us further from shore, starts a twinkle in our eyes, and we are new again. Bottle that feeling and you could be King. It’s the Holy Grail to an alcoholic. Caroline Knapp is the latest to throw her hat in the ring, dazzling us with her heady description of alcohol’s allure and its devastating hold, a high that is near impossible to sustain. In this memoir by the 36-year-old recovering alcoholic, shelves of experience and feeling tend to get neatly labeled and wrapped up with a “here let me tell you what alcoholism is all about” bravado, but really, there is no need to explain; the allusive quality of this insidious, cunning disease creeps up and grabs us.

The message is a little too obvious: Even an attractive, ivy league educated, award-winning life-style editor and columnist from an upper-middle-class intellectual family can be a drunk. “Sometimes, as a way of reminding myself how hidden the symptoms and effects of alcoholism can be, I’ll look around an AA meeting and tick off our collective accomplishments,” she writes. Revealing that an impressive resume does not grant immunity, Caroline Knapp reports that many alcoholics have achieved enviable success. “That’s not uncommon among high-functioning alcoholics: Drinkers like me tend to expend vast amounts of energy protecting our professional lives, maintaining the illusion that everything is, in fact, just fine. It’s part of what keeps us going.”

Perception is key to continued drinking. According to the author, most people cannot get past the image of a falling-down bum clutching a brown paper bag when they hear the word alcoholic. Someone in a suit, or “casual chic” as Caroline Knapp’s wardrobe dictated, who still has a job, a roof over their head and a car in the garage, does not compute in our lexicon of exterior values as a drunk. Nor did it in hers. The problem was not the drinking, it was the living with one man, sleeping with another, the aborted pregnancy, the back-to-back deaths of her parents, the near fatal accident with friends’ children, the deadlines.

It seems to go with the territory; there must always be someone in sorrier shape, a point of comparison to finger as the alcoholic in the author wraps her hand around one more glass of wine, one more for the road, one to her depression as a 12-year-old when the au pair went back to Denmark. As an adult, Caroline Knapp could count on Elaine, a boozy next-door neighbor caught in a doomed affair with a married man, to keep her from the truth: “Some small part of me (it got larger over the years) was always secretly relieved to see Elaine that way: a messy drunk’s an ugly thing, particularly when the drunk’s a woman, and I could compare myself to her and feel superiority and relief. I wasn’t that bad; no way I was that bad.”

The habit of comparing herself to others follows her into sobriety. The dramatic stories she hears in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings leave her waiting: “I sometimes feel a little out of place by comparison, a little guilty that my narrative is so spare, and I often wish I had a story that would lay out in clearer, more vivid detail.” When redacting the chaos of a fellow alcoholic’s traumatic upbringing she notes, “Mine was more along the lines of a John Updike novel or a short story by John Cheever.” Pages later she continues, “It was a well-ordered household. An Updike family, a Cheever clan: calm, educated, cocktails at seven.” These tag lines are not nearly as compelling as the lean prose she puts to paper about her highly charged relationship with her father.

A twin, she was her father’s favorite; not a Daddy’s girl, but a soul mate. “My father drank. He was a tall, distinguished man of bracing intelligence and insight and I grew scared of him, not because he was mean or violent but because he was anxious and sad himself and because he had a kind of intensity that made you feel he could see right through you.” An esteemed analyst, he brought his work home. “The problem was that he got in too deep, and that left me with the feeling of being a specimen instead of a daughter, something to be investigated and shaped instead of just loved, just simply loved.”

The irony is that Caroline Knapp made a career of investigating herself, shaping her experiences to fit the inches of her weekly column and reporting them as the travails of her alter ego, Alice K., a thirtysomething angst-ridden single woman who battles anorexia, deals with her dying parents and obsesses over bad men. Her take on alcoholism often feels like this week’s assignment. Get the notebook out, go to rehab, sit in AA meetings, hang out in coffee shops, research the statistics, and though it may take a year or so, you’ll get the story. She sells herself short.

“A lot of AA meetings begin with what’s called a ‘qualification,’ which means someone stands or sits in front of the room and tells their story to the rest of the group--what happened when they drank, how they changed after they stopped.” When Caroline Knapp sticks to her own story it can be as quietly moving as the mood that lifts in her family’s living room after her father is into his second martini and able to talk and laugh. When she tells the stories of the other members of AA, the narrative falls remarkably flat. Without context there is no resonance, it is just information being disseminated, and much like sitting at a bar listening to a stranger’s war stories, after a few too many--”a woman I know named so-and-so says this,” and “a man I know named so-and-so did that,” and “my friend so-and-so thinks”--interest wanes and there isn’t much to hang your hat on.

In the last paragraph of the book, Caroline Knapp hints at a greater understanding, a real affection. She fondly imagines her fellow alcoholics all tucking themselves into bed that night with another sober day behind them, their collective pain put to rest. The courage that carried her here has allowed her to put her notebook down, to be alone with the truth. Love of humanity can be a powerful elixir.