From time to time, we will post short interviews with interesting people about their thoughts and feelings on women and drinking. There is such a wide array of perspectives about this topic, and we are excited to gain insight into as many as possible and to share them with you.
Laura Munson is the author of the bestselling memoir, “This Is Not the Story You Think It Is: A Season of Unlikely Happiness” (Amy Einhorn/Putnam). She lives in Montana with her family.
Drinking Diaries: How old were you when you had your first drink and what was it?
Laura Munson: Sixth Grade. My brother bought my friend and me a six pack of Lowenbrau. We mixed it with vodka from her parents’ liquor cabinet in plastic Crate and Barrel mugs, (re-filling the vodka bottle with water), went to the ice-skating rink to flirt with boys, made total fools of ourselves, and I threw up in the car on the way home. Told my parents I’d hit my head on the ice. A proud moment.
How did/does your family treat drinking?
Drinking was for celebration and letting down your hair (which, where I grew up, was pretty pageboy/bobby-pinned perfect). Some of my fondest memories were of my parents’ parties– all those responsible adults who drove carpool and made us grilled cheese sandwiches would turn into caricatures of themselves, giving me big bosomy hugs with gin breath, a thick layer of smoke enshrouding the living room. They made it look so fun. And I don’t remember anyone ever throwing up.
What’s your drink of choice? Why?
Red wine. It reminds me of the year I lived in Italy and how the family I lived with would savor the Chianti they made, pouring it from old fiascos into low glasses like jelly jars. I never once saw any of them drunk. For them, wine is soul food. They respect it. They don’t abuse it. The Italians are good teachers that way.
Can you tell us about the best time you ever had drinking?
It was the year “Graceland” came out. I was 20, lying on a black sand nude beach on an island in Greece listening to it on my Walkman with a group of Auzzies, drinking Retsina and knowing that life would probably never be that good again. I was wrong. Sort of. (I’d kill to have that body back though!)
What about the worst time?
Doing a Madge Wildwood (“Breakfast at Tiffany’s”) timber in my living room in front of my entire family in the scene mentioned in my memoir. Every so often, there’s a rebel voice in me that kicks in when I’m under a lot of pressure or people are trying to control or run me. And I go into “F**k It” mode, which means there’s booze involved. Nothing good ever comes from “F**k It” mode, and I get to re-learn that the rebel is not necessarily or even usually free.
Do you have a favorite book, song, or movie about drinking?
There’s a book “Alcohol and the Writer” that I find fascinating. Fitzgerald. Hemingway. Steinbeck. Faulkner. O’Neill. Poe. Kerouac. Bukowski. Capote. Dorothy Parker. Katherine Anne Porter. All of them alcoholics. I’d like to see a new paradigm.
What do you like most about drinking?
I like the pause I take with a glass of wine. But there are other ways to take pause. The main thing is to savor it. Not gulp it. Gulping pauses is not very calming. I know because I have definitely gulped.
If you could be any drink, what would it be? Why?
I’d be a bottle of Bandol– Domaine Tempier, probably their rose, sitting in the middle of a table at its vineyard in France with: Lulu Peyraud, Alice Waters, Marcella Hazan, Mario Batali, Giuliano Bugialli, Anthony Bourdain, and Jim Harrison. To be consumed not by just what these wonders do on the page and in the kitchen, but to actually be swallowed whole by them.
