Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

Sarah Hepola's memoir opens in Paris, where she was on a magazine assignment. After an evening of cognac and dinner, her memory cut out as she walked through the lobby of her hotel. When consciousness returned, she found herself in bed having sex with a man she had never seen before. She did not know his name or how she got there. The scene introduces the book's central subject: the alcohol-induced blackout, a neurological event in which the brain stops forming long-term memories while the person remains outwardly functional.

Hepola contextualizes her drinking within a broader cultural moment. Writing as a 33-year-old freelance writer in New York, she describes how women's alcohol consumption nearly closed the gender gap with men's. Bumbling, intoxicated heroines populated popular culture, and her own comedic essays about drunken misadventures earned admiration rather than concern. She consults Aaron White, a researcher at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, who explains the science: When blood-alcohol content reaches a certain level, the hippocampus, the brain region responsible for long-term memory formation, shuts down. Women are more physiologically susceptible to blackouts than men. Hepola connects her drinking to the cultural conversation around consent, acknowledging that alcohol made consent murky.

Hepola grew up in Dallas, where her family moved in 1977 from a Philadelphia suburb. Her mother later became a therapist and grew less available. Her father was an introverted Finnish-American man whose own father was sent to a mental institution. At seven, Hepola began secretly sipping her parents' beer. The summer before sixth grade, at a Star World arcade party, an assistant manager handed the nearly 12-year-old a beer. She drank heavily, felt transformed, threw up seven times, and experienced her first blackout. Her older cousin Kimberley told her she had taken off her pants and cried about not being loved, but Hepola remembered none of it. She swore never to drink like that again, though the night served as a blueprint.

In middle school and high school, Hepola turned to binge eating and obsessive dieting. She formed intense friendships, first with Jennifer, a sensitive classmate, and later with Stephanie, a drama geek. By senior year, alcohol dissolved the social hierarchies that excluded her.

At the University of Texas at Austin, Hepola bonded with Anna, her peer advisor and most important lifelong friend. She maintained an on-and-off entanglement with her high school ex-boyfriend Miles. One night, devastated by the finality of their separation, she drank heavily, blacked out, and later learned she had been crying inconsolably, repeating, "No one will ever love me." Near the end of college, she dated Patrick, a professional cook who did not drink. When he ended the relationship, she did not date for seven years.

At 23, Hepola landed a job at the Austin Chronicle, where she began drinking wine while writing to overcome creative blocks. At 25, Anna sent a letter saying she could no longer absorb Hepola's drinking confessions. Hepola took the letter as rejection. She quit drinking for 18 months and traveled through South America but started again in Ecuador. She moved to Dallas to live with her boyfriend Lindsay and became the music critic at the Dallas Observer. An alcohol therapist warned her that men leave women who drink too much, and Lindsay left after two and a half years. Hepola took his cat, Bubba, and moved to New York.

The memoir returns to the Paris trip in full. On her last night, after cognac and dinner with her friend Meredith, a journalist living in Paris, Hepola blacked out in her hotel. She came to in a stranger's bed, fled without her purse, and went weeping to the concierge desk. The concierge, Johnson, helped her. Back in her room, she found her purse had been there all along, meaning she had visited the hotel bar, where she met the stranger. Johnson then arrived at her door uninvited, told her she was beautiful, and began kissing her. She could not bring herself to ask him to leave but eventually pushed him out. She felt this should have been her rock bottom, but she continued drinking for five more years.

In New York, her drinking escalated. She nearly burned down her apartment by passing out while cooking. She took a job at the online magazine Salon, but layoffs, criticism, and isolation compounded her despair. Stephanie confronted her about alarming behavior. Hepola moved to a tiny Manhattan studio and retreated into drinking with the lights off. Her therapist warned that therapy could not help if she kept drinking. On June 12, 2010, she blacked out at a wedding reception. In the bathtub that night, she realized no dramatic consequence might ever force her to stop; she would simply shrink, year by year. She called her mother and said, "I think I'm going to have to quit drinking." This time, she did.

The early days of sobriety were brutal. Hepola curled up in the closet of her studio apartment, using the enclosed darkness to ground herself against overwhelming anxiety. She reluctantly returned to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings, arms crossed and resistant. Work served as a refuge; her deputy editor Thomas calmly talked her out of quitting her job. She had tried AA at 25 but had resumed drinking after 18 months. This time, she slowly inched forward.

Sobriety strained her friendships. She could not summon the openness that alcohol once provided. After Anna gave birth, Hepola spiraled into anguish when Anna did not immediately respond to a text. Before leaving New York, she reconnected with Stephanie, realizing she had been too consumed by envy to see Stephanie's own struggles. One year to the day she got sober, she moved back to Dallas.

A year and a half into sobriety, Hepola was nearly 50 pounds overweight from replacing alcohol with junk food. She dieted, lost the weight, and began taking care of herself, finding that doing so produced genuine happiness. She walked her aging cat Bubba on a leash, the two venturing outside together.

Dating sober terrified her. She practiced saying no and eventually discovered that sober sex could produce its own form of connection. An old cassette tape from 1988 surfaced, on which the 13-year-old Hepola narrated a confusing sexual encounter with Brad, an 18-year-old she had met in Michigan. The tape revealed the origins of a lifelong pattern: suppressing her own feelings for someone else's pleasure, with alcohol facilitating the erasure.

Hepola dismantles the myth that creativity requires alcohol. After six months of not writing, she published an essay about quitting that sounded like her real voice. She established a sober routine, learned guitar, and found a form of spirituality in storytelling, human connection, and the night sky above Anna's West Texas home.

Bubba developed cancer, and Jennifer, now a veterinarian, came to euthanize him. Hepola was devastated but never once thought drinking would help, understanding for the first time that alcohol only postpones pain. Her father revealed he had quit drinking 10 years earlier, and Hepola recognized how much of her personality came from him. Seven years later, she flew back to the same Paris hotel. It had changed ownership, and no one knew Johnson. She left without answers but with the peace of having looked. She visited Anna in West Texas, accepting that their friendship had changed but endured. She met a younger woman struggling with alcohol and recognized her former self. Every sobriety tale is a cliffhanger, Hepola reflects: None of us knows how our story ends. But she no longer forgets. Now she remembers.