Good Books – Sarah Hepola’s Blackout

Alcoholism is a subject that’s mostly avoided the drinks biz – but it’s one of the 800 pound gorillas in the room. We all know people who drink recklessly – who are victims to alcohol’s pleasures and pull. It may be one of the reasons that some are drawn to our industry to begin with. After all if you enjoy getting buzzed, the alcohol business is not a bad place to be…just sayin’.

Which brings us to Sarah Hepola’s Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget, a compelling account of one woman’s “drinking life” and her very personal journey back from self-destruction.

I share some things with the author. We both started drinking young (she was sneaking sips of beer at seven – I drank my first beer at nine). We both enjoy writing, (Ms. Hepola did years of newspaper work, was a music critic at The Dallas Observer and is currently an editor at Salon).

We’ve also both experienced blackouts…

A blackout is a period while intoxicated when, as Ms. Hepola explains, “the memory is totally disabled,” even though one might be functioning or even in full-on party mode. A blackout is the furthest thing from passing out, another condition that it’s at times confused with. And it doesn’t happen to everyone – the mind simply stops making memories for a period of time.

But unlike many other drug experiences, blackouts are seldom discussed, and are as a result, the author explains, a “menace hiding in plain sight.”

Addiction memoirs are memoir’s first and Sarah Hepola, a gifted writer, chronicles her life with unflinching truthfulness and sometimes welcome humor.

Beer was Ms. Hepola’s “gateway drug” and alcohol her constant companion for decades. Drinking erased her shyness, fueled her creative spirits growing up, and served the backdrop for a young Dallas transplant, living as a writer in New York City.

It also led to progressively erratic behavior like falling down stairs – and terrifying holes in her memory.

Imagine waking up in someone’s bed while in Paris on a business trip, with no idea how you got there or who the person next to you was. Imagine a life spent just trying to remember what you did last night and the constant struggle to maintain some façade of normalcy with your life increasingly spiraling out of control.

Sarah Hepola, lived this, until she knew she couldn’t any longer. And her harrowing road back to sobriety, which she addresses with the same brutal honestly and self-deprecating humor, was no cakewalk either. But she did it… She did it one day at a time and this artful memoir is no doubt a part of that “coming back.”

Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget is a brave book – sometimes raw, sometimes quietly inspirational and the author makes no excuses for her past. This book isn’t about her congratulating herself – nor does she pander in convenient self-help clichés.

Sarah Hepola’s Blackout is a powerful meditation on the life she lived and on drinking to forget. And as a member of the craft beer community, and someone who writes and “drinks professionally,” I can’t recommend it enough.