Reading List

Authors Like Caroline Knapp

From 1988 to 1995 Caroline Knapp was an editor and columnist at the Boston Phoenix, where her column “Out There” often followed a neurotic alter ego called Alice K. Drinking: A Love Story (1996), her account of life as a high-functioning alcoholic who drank through her parents’ deaths from cancer, became a bestseller. Pack of Two (1998) is about Lucille, the shepherd mix she adopted from a pound, and why people give dogs a love they may not risk with another person. In April 2002 she was diagnosed with lung cancer; she married the photographer Mark Morelli in May and died on 3 June, aged 42. Appetites: Why Women Want, which connects her anorexia to the ways women ration their own desires, came out the following year. The ten writers below share her ground: drinking and hunger, recovery without a neat ending, and the animals and friends who help.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Memoir · Addiction and appetite · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Caroline Knapp, start with Leslie Jamison, whose The Recovering (2018) tells her own drinking and sobriety alongside the lives of writers who drank. Sarah Hepola’s Blackout (2015) is the closest drinking memoir by a woman journalist since Drinking, and Gail Caldwell’s Let’s Take the Long Way Home (2010) is about her friendship with Knapp herself. Further down are the earlier writers of solitary drinking and dogs, and a memoirist who argues with the whole language of appetite.

10 authors like Caroline Knapp

01
Drinking alone, before memoir

Jean Rhys

Dominican-British · Voyage in the Dark (1934), Good Morning, Midnight (1939), Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

Rhys was born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams in Roseau, Dominica, in 1890, the daughter of a Welsh doctor and a white Creole mother, and came to England at sixteen. Good Morning, Midnight follows Sasha Jansen, a woman alone in Paris who has decided to drink herself to death. After her novels of the 1930s she largely disappeared from view until Wide Sargasso Sea. She died in 1979.

The novelist who first wrote a woman drinking alone from the inside, without moralising and with a cold sense of humour. Knapp’s memoir tells the same private ritual sixty years later, with recovery as a possibility Rhys’s heroines never have.

— Lisanne

Every book by Jean Rhys →

02
The dog book behind Pack of Two

J. R. Ackerley

British · My Dog Tulip (1956), We Think the World of You (1960)

Ackerley was born in London in 1896 and died there in 1967. From 1935 to 1959 he was literary editor of the BBC’s magazine The Listener. My Dog Tulip is about his life with Queenie, an Alsatian he took on in 1946, renamed in the book. He was openly gay when sex between men was illegal in Britain, and his posthumous memoir My Father and Myself describes discovering his father’s second family.

The classic of the literature Pack of Two surveys: a solitary writer who finds in a dog the steady attachment human relationships failed to give. Ackerley is franker and stranger; Knapp asks more directly why the bond works.

— Lisanne
03
The column as confession

Nora Ephron

American · Crazy Salad (1975), Heartburn (1983), I Feel Bad About My Neck (2006)

Ephron was born in New York in 1941 and died there in 2012. She began as a journalist (Crazy Salad), wrote the novel Heartburn and the screenplay for When Harry Met Sally... (1989), and late in life published two bestselling essay collections about ageing, I Feel Bad About My Neck and I Remember Nothing (2010).

The companion for Alice K.’s Guide to Life: a journalist who turned her own anxieties about bodies, men and shopping into comic columns. Ephron stays funny where Knapp turns serious, which shows how much Alice K. was hiding.

— Lisanne

Every book by Nora Ephron →

04
The eating disorder memoir

Marya Hornbacher

American · Wasted (1998), Madness: A Bipolar Life (2008)

Hornbacher was born in Walnut Creek, California, in 1974. Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, written when she was 23, describes her years of eating disorders; Madness is about her bipolar disorder. She has also written Sane (2010), about addiction and the Twelve Steps.

Hornbacher and Knapp both describe anorexia from inside its logic, as a way of managing hunger and fear rather than vanity. Hornbacher’s book is rawer and younger; Appetites looks back on the same illness from her late thirties.

— Lisanne
05
The friend’s side of the story

Gail Caldwell

American · A Strong West Wind (2006), Let’s Take the Long Way Home (2010)

Caldwell was born in Amarillo, Texas, in 1951 and was chief book critic of The Boston Globe from 1985 to 2009; she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2001. Let’s Take the Long Way Home is about her friendship with Knapp, and New Life, No Instructions (2014) returns to her childhood polio.

The essential companion to Knapp’s books, and the only one on this list about her. Caldwell writes the sobriety, the dogs and the last illness from the outside, in the same plain, exact register Knapp used.

— Lisanne
06
Drinking, then faith

Mary Karr

American · The Liars’ Club (1995), Lit (2009), The Art of Memoir (2015)

Karr was born in Groves, Texas, in 1955. The Liars’ Club is her memoir of a chaotic Texas childhood; Lit follows her own drinking, her recovery and her conversion to Catholicism. The Art of Memoir is her book about the form.

Karr’s Lit covers the same territory as Drinking: a clever, successful woman who drinks in secret and finally goes to meetings. Karr is louder and funnier, and her recovery runs through religion where Knapp’s runs through work and a dog.

— Lisanne

Every book by Mary Karr →

07
The blackout drinker’s memoir

Sarah Hepola

American · Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget (2015)

Hepola worked at the Austin Chronicle from 1997 and later became personal essays editor at Salon. Blackout covers her years as a heavy drinker who often blacked out and her first years in recovery; she has said she wanted to tell the story past the moment of quitting.

The closest successor to Drinking: a working journalist who drank to be braver and funnier, and who writes about stopping without pretending it was easy. Hepola’s subject is the blackout itself, the hours she cannot remember.

— Lisanne
08
Recovery, and the stories about it

Leslie Jamison

American · The Empathy Exams (2014), The Recovering (2018), Splinters (2024)

Jamison was born in Washington, D.C., in 1983 and teaches at Columbia University. The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath combines the story of her own drinking and sobriety with the lives of writers who drank, among them Raymond Carver and John Berryman, and a history of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Jamison takes Knapp’s question further: why are drinking stories more glamorous than recovery stories, and what does a sober life give a writer? She shares Knapp’s honesty about how much she loved drinking.

— Lisanne

Every book by Leslie Jamison →

09
Writers and the bottle

Olivia Laing

British · The Trip to Echo Spring (2013), The Lonely City (2016)

Laing was born in 1977 and grew up in an alcoholic family. The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking follows the drinking lives of writers including John Cheever, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway; The Lonely City mixes her own time alone in New York with the lives of artists. Her novel Crudo won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2019.

Laing writes about drinking from the outside, through other people’s lives, and about loneliness from the inside, which is the other half of Knapp’s subject. The Lonely City pairs well with The Merry Recluse.

— Lisanne

Every book by Olivia Laing →

10
The argument about appetite

Roxane Gay

American · Bad Feminist (2014), Hunger (2017)

Gay was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1974 to Haitian parents. Bad Feminist, a collection of essays, became a New York Times bestseller. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body describes how a gang rape when she was twelve shaped her relationship with food and her body, and is divided into “The Before” and “The After”.

The writer on this list who complicates the rest. Appetites is about a woman starving herself; Hunger is about how an assault in childhood shaped a lifetime of eating and weight. Read together they show that the same hunger can take opposite forms, and that a thin body is not proof of control.

— Lisanne

Every book by Roxane Gay →

Where to start if you loved Caroline Knapp

If you loved Drinking: A Love Story, read Sarah Hepola.

Blackout: a journalist’s drinking and the nights she cannot remember.

If you want to understand recovery, read Leslie Jamison.

The Recovering: her own sobriety, writers who drank and the history of AA.

If you loved Pack of Two, read J. R. Ackerley.

My Dog Tulip: a solitary writer and the dog who changed his life.

If you want Knapp from the outside, read Gail Caldwell.

Let’s Take the Long Way Home: their friendship, their dogs and her last illness.

If you want more Caroline Knapp, read her in order.

Alice K.’s Guide to Life (1994), Drinking: A Love Story (1996) and Pack of Two (1998) appeared in her lifetime; Appetites (2003) and The Merry Recluse (2004) after her death. Most readers start with Drinking.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Caroline Knapp

Who writes like Caroline Knapp?

Leslie Jamison, Sarah Hepola and Gail Caldwell are the closest matches. Jamison’s The Recovering and Hepola’s Blackout are drinking memoirs by women writers, and Caldwell’s Let’s Take the Long Way Home is about her friendship with Knapp.

What should I read after Drinking: A Love Story?

Sarah Hepola’s Blackout (2015) and Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering (2018) are the closest. Mary Karr’s Lit (2009) covers drinking and recovery with more humour.

What books are like Appetites: Why Women Want?

Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted (1998) is a memoir of anorexia and bulimia, and Roxane Gay’s Hunger (2017) writes about a body and appetite from the opposite direction.

Who wrote about Caroline Knapp after her death?

Her friend Gail Caldwell, in Let’s Take the Long Way Home (2010), a memoir of their friendship, their dogs and Knapp’s illness.

Which Caroline Knapp book should I read first?

Drinking: A Love Story (1996), her best-known book. Read Pack of Two (1998) next if you love dogs, or Appetites (2003) for her thinking about women and desire.

Does Caroline Knapp have a new book?

No. She died in June 2002, and her last two books, Appetites (2003) and The Merry Recluse (2004), were published after her death.

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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