My friends and I, like Judge and his, saw ourselves as part of a group we referred to as “Alcoholics Unanimous.” We responded to an emerging organization called Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) by proposing Drunks Against Mad Mothers (DAMM). We were, not to put too fine a point on it, idiots.

By temperament — lucky for me, or maybe not, socially — I was not a jock or among the heavy drinkers. I hoped to be seen, to use a final, painful acronym that was popular at the time, one that is not in Judge’s book, and please kill me now, as a SNAG, or sensitive new-age guy. I failed at that, too; another reason to pull out the church keys, as we sometimes called beer openers.

We tend to judge memoirs of intoxication by how brightly the writer burns in the early parts of the story — the most memorable moments tend to occur as the moth’s wings have just begun to scorch. This is because the sober endings, the meetings in brightly-lit basements, are nearly always the same: uplifting for the author, less so for us. An exception to this rule is Leslie Jamison’s “The Recovering,” published this year, in which the writing gets stronger and stranger near the end.

Judge isn’t a skilled enough writer to evoke the complicated longings that alcohol can instill. At moments of intensity, he tends to lean on analogies from his favorite J.R.R. Tolkien book. (“I imagined myself as Frodo in ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ carrying the evil ring through the forest”; “I was like Gollum”; “I feel like the hobbits after they were captured by the Orcs.”) A little of this, like Jägermeister, goes a long way.

Still, the facts say quite a lot. Judge spends a good deal of time describing “Beach Week,” a phase that, thanks to the emergence of Kavanaugh’s youthful calendar, is on the way to becoming a euphemism as well-known as South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s “hiking the Appalachian Trail.”

In Judge’s account, beach houses were rented by students after their sophomore year — the boys had the middle house, with girls in houses on either side, with almost no adult supervision — and chaos ensued. Judge puts it this way: “We lit each other’s underwear on fire, had beer fights and barfed in the sink. A couple of guys took pictures of their penises, and when it became evident that one of the guys had a member that slanted, we called him Slope.”

He describes a sense of camaraderie among the attendees, the girls as well as the boys — they’d all grown up together, they were virtually siblings. He writes: “If you could breathe and walk at the same time, you could hook up with someone.” He adds: “This did not mean going all the way for the most part, these girls held to the beliefs of their very conservative families.”