Blackout
Remembering the things I drank to forget
-
- 5,49 €
-
- 5,49 €
Publisher Description
'SIMPLY EXTRAORDINARY' New York Times
'It's such a savage thing to lose your memory, but the crazy thing is, it doesn't hurt one bit. A blackout doesn't sting, or stab, or leave a scar when it robs you. Close your eyes and open them again. That's what a blackout feels like.'
For Sarah Hepola, alcohol was 'the gasoline of all adventure'. She spent her evenings at cocktail parties and dark bars where she proudly stayed till last call. Drinking felt like freedom, part of her birthright as an enlightened twenty-first-century woman.
But there was a price. She often blacked out, waking up with a blank space where four hours should be. Mornings became detective work on her own life. What did I say last night? How did I meet that guy?
Publicly, she covered her shame with self-deprecating jokes, and her career flourished, but as the blackouts accumulated, she could no longer avoid a sinking truth. The fuel she thought she needed was draining her spirit instead.
A memoir of unblinking honesty and poignant, laugh-out-loud humor, BLACKOUT is the story of a woman stumbling into a new adventure-the sober life she never wanted. Shining a light into her blackouts, she discovers the person she buried, as well as the confidence, intimacy, and creativity she once believed came only from a bottle. Her tale will resonate with anyone who has been forced to reinvent themselves or struggled in the face of necessary change. It's about giving up the thing you cherish most-but getting yourself back in return.
A raw, vivid and ultimately uplifting memoir of addiction and recovery for anyone who is looking to find their way.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Alcoholism is one of our most extensively documented illnesses, perhaps because—as Sarah Hepola eloquently establishes in this irreverent, fiercely intelligent book—writing and drinking go awfully well together. But even in the crowded field of booze memoirs, Hepola’s account stands out; she looks back on her drunken escapades with hard-won perception and faces her (sober) future with admirable realism. Yes, Blackout covers familiar territory. But Hepola’s version is so well told, it’s virtually impossible to put down.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Using as touchstone the astonishing self-revelatory memoir Drinking: A Love Story, by Caroline Knapp, Salon editor and Dallas journalist Hepola delves into her own lush life as the merry lit gal about town with unique intensity. Growing up in Dallas in the late 1970s and '80s, Hepola was an early convert to the sensation of intoxication that alcohol induced: she snuck sips of beer from her mother's open cans left in the refrigerator, and later found drinking an effective way out of adolescent self-consciousness. By college in Austin, she had embraced the drinking culture with gusto, though she did recognize by age 20 that she had a drinking problem; her nights out were often accompanied by blackouts, after which she relied on friends to fill in the messy details. Working as a journalist at the Austin Chronicle and the Dallas Observer before moving to New York City to freelance at age 31, Hepola naturally equated writing with drinking, because "wine turned down the volume on own self-doubt." But the blackouts began to take their toll, and waking up in strangers' beds with no memory of how she got there felt terrifying. In this valiant, gracious work of powerful honesty, Hepola confronts head-on the minefield of self-sabotage that binge drinking caused in her work, relationships, and health before she eventually turned her life around.
