To drown the sorrows.

To celebrate the often meager victories.

Maybe there was no reason at all.

Maybe it was just in the gene pool.

There was the hard stuff. Something hauled from the top shelf. There was the perfectly pulled Guinness draft with the foamy top.

Ahh. It almost saved a flight home. It could borrow a moment from eternity.

The very same neighborhood also spilled with the exuberance of children, lots and lots of children, most of them named for saints, or for someone "back home," which usually meant Ireland.

Sure there were Barbies and baseball gloves, Daniel Boone caps and American Bandstand, but Dingle, or Cork City or Galway Bay, 3,000 miles away, felt as close as downtown Springfield, where Santa was at Christmas, in Steiger's or Forbes & Wallace, intently listening.

Like he was going to fulfill every wish.

The place, Hungry Hill, a section of Springfield with a moniker for which no one can place the exact origins, had as many legends as the books on the shelves at the local branch of the library, which was always filled with stories of sports heroes, medieval knights, political giants and books on martyred saints.

Neighborhood legends were repeated so much and with such conviction they might as well have been facts.

Maybe they were.

Then there were the nicknames.

As a form of identification, they were better than a Social Security number, inventive or cruel, telling or exaggerated, sometimes a combination of all of the above.

Unlike a bawdy tattoo, regardless of a future social status, how pretty or handsome your spouse, or how fat the bank account, or where one might be spending the afterlife, be it heaven or hell, they could not be erased. Nicknames were more permanent than your permanent record at Our Lady of Hope School.

And, if you believed the nuns - we did - you would be hard-pressed to come up with anything more permanent on this Earth.

Carole O'Malley Gaunt's book, "Hungry Hill" (University of Massachusetts Press, $19.95) begins before John F. Kennedy was president and before both her parents needed a final resting place, hand-dug, probably by Irish immigrants, 6 feet under at St. Michael's Cemetery in the Pine Point neighborhood of the City of Homes, leaving eight children behind, the youngest no more than 2, the oldest a sophomore in high school.

That was Carole, the second of eight, the only girl, an Elvis Presley fan hoping for a dance at the grammar school hop.

Responsibility could have been her middle name.

"Hungry Hill" could be only about one neighborhood in Springfield, in the 01104 ZIP code.

But, really, it is about anyone who had the grace, guts or desperation to attend an Alcoholics Anonymous, Al-Anon or Adult Children of Alcoholics meeting.

Carole O'Malley Gaunt tells her story unblinkingly, without sentiment, leavened with humor and humanity.

Names, dates, the exact address.

Nuns and priests. People who in their wildest imagination would never believe they'd be found in a book.

There they are.

The shadow of "the drink" is as obvious as a nose on a face.

Two writers who have won the Pulitzer Prize - Maddy Blais and Frank McCourt - one from Granby, the other from Limerick, have praised her work, her writing and her guts

That is no small accomplishment.

Pulitzer Prize winners aren't alone. Proof is in the onslaught of e-mails Carole O'Malley Gaunt has received in reaction to her book, which is influenced by the works of writers Richard Rhodes, Geoffrey and Tobias Wolff, Mary Karr and Joan Didion.

Reviewers from across the country have tried to spin the kind of prose in its 284 pages.

Her in-box is flooded with stories, the details different, but the hurt and emotional truth the same.

The correspondents tell of the deprivation and diversion the bottle caused in their lives.

Of becoming a friend of Bill W.

Or wanting to give Carole a big emotional hug.

Hungry Hill isn't such a small neighborhood as you might think.