Stopping to drink

But Bruno says he really stopped drinking not because of AA but because of Luca. One day, the two of them went to the shop across the road, a place run by Algerian immigrants, where we buy milk when we run out, and vegetables, or fruit. Luca looked at the high shelf, the bottles of dark wine, pointed and said, "Daddy." After that, Bruno only ever had one more drink – on my birthday. It was the saddest birthday, the day of his last drink. Not because I grieved for the passing of his alcoholism, but because I knew, instinctively, that he would change and never again be the man I married. Because, in fact, part of that love was based on the passion, the drink, the fury, the rage, the anger, the drive, that made him so intense. Without it, there was a smaller person who looked sad and hardened by life.

© Janine di Giovanni 2011.
Extracted from Ghosts by Daylight: A Memoir of War and Love (Bloomsbury)