Or they might just forget bits and pieces, in a fragmentary blackout, or a brownout, as some call it. “We don’t have any national data.”Ī blackout can mean the total erasure of an entire chunk of time from a person’s memory, an occurrence known as an en bloc blackout. “Blackouts have basically been ignored as a subject of study,” White says. But there have been no more comprehensive population surveys on how common they are. In a survey he did at Duke University, 51 percent of students who reported ever having consumed any alcohol had experienced at least one blackout. Still, White says, “anyone can black out at least once, if you drink in the right way-or the wrong way.” Blackouts are commonly seen in alcoholics, in part because people can build up a tolerance to some of the other negative consequences of alcohol-loss of balance, for instance-but not so much to its effects on memory. In a survey of Alcoholics Anonymous members, Jellinek found that many reported having frequently blacked out, and a link between blackouts and alcoholism became entrenched. Jellinek to thank-the “father of the modern disease model of alcoholism,” according to Aaron White, the senior advisor to the director at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). And I drank for five more years.”īlackouts were once thought to be the domain of alcoholics alone, a risk factor that amounted to a sort of input/output equation: If blackout, then alcoholic.
“As I lay in my hotel bed, covers pulled up to my neck, I felt the gratitude of a woman who knows, finally, she is done,” Hepola writes of that night. Toast it too much, of course, and you won’t remember the thing you were trying to cherish.
There’s something about a night you know is special that makes you want to keep toasting it. So often, alcohol is how we relate, how we celebrate. In a way, she’s just following the standard script, if taking it too far. She wonders of her alcoholism and her life’s other problems, “What was the source of my sadness, and what was its collateral damage?” Looking for connection through the brown telescope of a beer (or two or 10) is a gamble.
How it gave her the courage to ask for what she wanted. She writes of her perfectionism, and how alcohol freed her from it. Hepola conveys both the horror in the mysteries left after a night smudged dark by drinking, and the draw of overdrinking that kept her carving out her memory with alcohol. It’s a memoir of her alcoholism-specifically her propensity to drink to the point of oblivion-but also an empathetic dissection of addiction and American drinking culture, and the blurry lines between the two. So writes Sarah Hepola, in her new book Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget. “We’re all looking for ways to be close at a distance.
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