I Loved You All: A Novel

Years after that summer, my mother told us that she had awakened one morning when she was thirty-seven and found she needed a little whisky to start the day. She understood that she had undergone a kind of change of life overnight, slid into a new personal chemistry that required alcohol the way a car needs gasoline to run. The feeling, she said, was as definite as knowing you were gravely ill, or that you were pregnant.