Sex, Jealousy, Blackouts… Sarah Hepola's New Drinking Memoir is Totally Sobering
Writer and editor Sarah Hepola was seven when began stealing swigs from her mom’s half-finished beers, and all of 11 the first time she got drunk. The heady highs of those early buzzes marked the start of the most all-encompassing love affair of Hepola’s life: a fling with the bottle that would consume her through her mid-thirties. Alcohol was “the gasoline of all adventure,” as she writes, so Hepola drank when she was thrilled, sad, bored, lonely. She drank to write, and she drank to date, and – crippled by insecurity from a young age – she definitely required a drink or six to have sex.
But Hepola’s new memoir, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget, isn’t just another addiction/recovery memoir about a nice girl’s fall from — and eventual return to — grace. As its title indicates, Hepola’s book focuses on the shadowy gaps in her day-to-day life – the interludes that were lost to social drinking’s darker rival: the blackout. Women drinkers can be more at risk for this phenomenon, and Hepola certainly was. The blackouts were enough to get her kicked out of her Brooklyn apartment for almost burning it down. Enough to make friends distance themselves. And enough to have nights that regularly ended like this one, on a magazine assignment in Paris: “When the curtain lifts again, this is what I see: there is a bed, and I’m on it. The lights are low. Sheets are wrapped around my ankles, soft and cool against my skin. I’m on top of a guy I’ve never seen before, and we’re having sex.”
Like most alcoholics, Hepola never sought to lose hours of her life to terrifying “blank space[s] where pivotal scenes should be.” The blackouts were an unavoidable consequence of doing the thing she loved – the thing that helped her escape the numbing sadness and fear that had eaten away at her since childhood. Until that thing she loved became something else, something with consequences too grave to bear, and Hepola joined AA, moved home to Dallas, and committed herself to a new life.
Yahoo Style spoke with Hepola via telephone.
Yahoo Style: In Blackout you mention that you’ve always known you wanted to be a writer. But I assume this wasn’t the book you always fantasized about writing. How did you realize this was the book you needed to write?
Sarah Hepola: Everyone tells you to write what you know. And what do I know more than anything else on the planet? Myself, and drinking. I had an unofficial PhD in drinking. Also, recovery memoirs were a life raft for me in the years that I was trying to quit and in the early months of sobriety. I don’t like advice or medical pamphlets because I’m so defiant. But when people sat down and told me their stories, I was riveted.
YS: In the book you wrote about how you always unconsciously equated drinking with adulthood. What do you equate it with now? And what does adulthood look like for you these days?
SH: That’s a great question. Today I associate drinking with my childhood. It was part of the way I came to terms with growing up. In college and early adulthood I [was] wrapped up in a fantasy of who I was. I needed you to tell me the soft lies: ‘You look great in that dress.’ ‘Yes, that size 4 fits you.’ I never felt like I was as good as the people around me, yet at the same time I felt entitled to more success. I was that weird mix of wildly entitled and wildly insecure. Now, I associate adulthood with … doing things you don’t necessarily want to do, because they’re the right thing. Quitting drinking wasn’t something I wanted to do.
You end up making the hard decisions because those are short-term pain, long-term gain.
YS: Did you feel nostalgic for drinking at all while writing this book? Some of your escapades sounded kind of … fun.
SH: Nostalgia is dangerous. You have to be very careful with it. But I fell in love with alcohol in such a full-bodied way that to tell my story and not acknowledge that [wouldn’t have been] true. The story didn’t end when I got sober. I really wanted to show the long walk after I quit. If you stay in that place of ‘It was a roaring good time!’ too long, you get [stuck there], and you leave out the mourning process that many of us go through [after giving up drinking].
YS: You wrote about how you used drinking to help you navigate dating and sex. It seems like that’s common for women.
SH: For me, it initially [stemmed] from a profound, to-my-bones body consciousness. I felt like I was the girl next to the girl you wanted to talk to. All my friends were getting hit on, and I felt invisible. So what could I bring to the table? I could be the girl that was very sexually available and could blow your mind. Whenever I talk about this, I cringe. But I think young women are so eager to have their worth confirmed sexually. I got this dangerous idea that the more men I slept with, the more sexy and desirable I was. And because I wasn’t that comfortable in my own skin, I was really uncomfortable being intimate with anyone I was interested in. Drinking became a way to push myself to go for what I wanted.
YS: In general, women are taught to compete and compare themselves with other women. Can you remember how that played into your drinking
SH: I’m so glad you’re bringing this up, because I think it’s a really important theme. I had a toxic burning envy in me. It [first began] when we were starting to get attention from boys. My female friends and I were bonded over feeling kind of invisible at school. When that switched and my best friend Jennifer began to get attention from upperclassmen, I was blind with envy. How do you deal with the fact that you love this person, and you [also] want harm to come to them because it would somehow make you feel better that they’re not getting what they want? In my college years, I could drink those feelings away, and it was wonderful to feel so uncomplicated toward these women I love.
YS: How did you get over those feelings? Was that a product of sobriety
SH: I’m 40 now – we always talk about what sucks about getting older, but we don’t talk enough about what’s awesome. [Like how] you’re not as self-conscious and invested in looking cool. Also, if you’re lucky, you can stop experiencing life as this constant horse race: ‘Who’s in the lead? Who’s next?’ What’s really helped me, and this is going to sound corny, is becoming more of the person I wanted to be. A lot of that envy was about wanting accolades for work I hadn’t done. I wasn’t taking care of myself, but I wanted people to think I was.
YS: You wrote a lot about friendships. How have your friendships changed since you got sober?
SH: I drank with all my friends, so when I quit I was so worried – ‘How are we going to be close again?’ I took a risk and told them that. And when I was honest about those fears, we became closer.
YS: You talk about how you expected the universe to reward you in some way for finally giving up drinking – finding the perfect boyfriend, etc. Were you angry when it didn’t.
SH: I thought when I finally gave up drinking that I was going to lose weight effortlessly, and OBVIOUSLY I was going to get the perfect boyfriend, because that’s only fair. But I needed to get out of the idea that the universe rewards you for good behavior. Good behavior is its own reward. Getting sober, coming back to my own life, piecing together my friendships, finding comfort in my body – those were the rewards. It was a very slow process, and addicts are instant-gratification monsters.
Another thing [I realized is that I] had an addiction to the fantasy and delusion of romance and what it would provide me, and I had to scrub the cartoon hearts out of my eyes. We get this delusion that the guy is going to fix us, and that’s just not going to happen.
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