I joined a women’s book club when I was in my late 20s. It was called “Bitches and Books,” which seemed funny at the time. We gathered once a month, and balanced tiny white plates of brie and crackers on our knees as we discussed Ann Patchett and Augusten Burroughs and drank wine. Rivers of wine. Waterfalls of wine. Wine and confession. Wine and sisterhood.
Wine had become our social glue, the mechanism of our bonding. We needed the wine to shut out the jackhammers of our own perfectionism and unlock the secrets we kept within. Wine was the centerpiece of dinner parties and relaxing evenings at home. It was a requirement for work events and formal festivities. Let’s not even mention the word “bachelorette.” Friends moved their weddings out of churches and into restaurants and bars, where waiters served champagne before the bride had even appeared. The cool mothers had chardonnay playdates and never let the demands of child rearing keep them from happy hour. DIY sites sold onesies with a wink. Mommy drinks because I cry.
I wrote stories about my drinking. Some were fiction, and some were painfully true, and I liked that my snappy comic tone made it hard to tell which was which. I wrote about getting wasted before 4 pm (true) and waking up after a hard-partying music festival next to Chuck Klosterman (not true), slamming shots with strangers and drinking queso from a to-go cup (more or less true). Women today are notorious for judging each other—about how we raise children, about how we look in a swimsuit, about how we discuss race, gender, or class. Yet no matter how reckless or boozing my tales were, I never felt judged for one of them. In fact, I kind of thought women looked up to me.
By the late aughts, bumbling, blotto heroines were a staple of our narratives. Bridget Jones’s Diary was like a tree that had grown a thousand limbs. Carrie Bradshaw was a media empire. Chelsea Handler was building a savvy business brand playing the part of a woman much drunker and more foolish than she could possibly be. (Was there any book title more indicative of the moment than Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea? A longing for spiritual deliverance, the innocence of young adult literature, and Grey Goose.) My smart, successful female friends tore through their Us Weeklies, while New Yorkers piled on a corner table like homework, and followed the misadventures of the era’s party girls. In an age of sex tapes and beaver shots, there was nothing edgy or remotely shocking about a woman like me reporting that, hey, everyone, I fell off my bar stool.
I sometimes wondered what my mother thought. “Well, I think you exaggerate,” she told me once. In the personal essay I’d just written, for example, I mentioned having six beers. “I don’t think a woman can have that many drinks in one night,” she said. And my mother was right—it was more like eight.
They added up fast! Two drinks at home getting ready, three drinks with dinner, three pints at the bar afterward. And those were the nights I kept count.
My mother never drank like me. She was a sipper. A one-glass-with-dinner kind of lady. She tells me she cut loose at college frat parties, dancing in her bobby socks—a phrase that suggests how wild she did not get—but I’ve never seen her drunk and couldn’t imagine what it would look like. When her extended family got together, my rowdy Irish uncles gathered in a separate room, splitting a bottle of Scotch and laughing loudly enough to rattle the walls, while my mother and her sister took care of the kids. Screw that. I wanted to be the center of the party, not the person sweeping up afterward.
By the time I was old enough to drink, culture had shifted to accommodate my desires. For generations, women had been the abstainers, the watchdogs and caretakers—women were a major force behind Prohibition, after all—but as women’s place in society rose, so did their consumption, and ’70s feminists ushered in a new spirit of equal-opportunity drinking. Over the following decades, as men turned away from the bottle, women did not, which meant that by the twenty-first century, when it came to drinking, women had nearly closed the gender gap. A 2013 CDC report declared binge drinking a “dangerous health problem” for women 18 to 34, especially whites and Hispanics. Nearly 14 million women in the country enjoyed an average of three binges a month, six drinks at a time. That equates to a hell of a lot of book clubs.
It’s worth noting that the country, as a whole, is drinking less than we used to when alcohol hit its peak in the 1970s, the result of a higher drinking age and a shift away from three-martini lunches, among other factors. But a certain group of women have made booze a very public and very integral part of their culture. Young, educated, and drunk: That was life on the ground for me.