Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget (26 page)

AA reminds you how much of our stories are the same. This is also what literature, and science, and religion will remind you as well. We all want to believe our pain is singular—that no one else has felt this way—but our pain is ordinary, which is both a blessing and a curse. It means we’re not unique. But it also means we’re not alone. One of the best sayings I ever heard someone toss out at a meeting: If you’ve fucked a zebra, someone else has fucked two. I haven’t seen it hung next to the other slogans yet, but I’m hoping.

The woman draws her purse onto her lap. Her life feels clouded, she says. She’s not sure who she is, or what she wants anymore. She tells me her story, which is carved with her own particulars, but the template is familiar. We arrive at a place of reckoning as strangers to ourselves. When she starts to cry, she reaches for Kleenex in her purse, apologizing once more.

“You should have seen how much I cried when I quit,” I said. “Insane tears.”

“It’s hard for me to believe you were ever like this,” she says.

I try to explain to her. The despair, the frailty, the emotional hurly-burly—I lived there once, too. And she stares at me like I’m trying to sell her something.

“It’s just that I look at you, and it’s clear you know who you are,” she says. I am wearing sweatpants pulled from the floor, because I was running late, and no makeup. Not my most Hollywood look. But it’s also true that I am not befogged with need and wanting anymore.

I don’t know how it happened, or exactly how long it took. But I looked up one day and discovered, to my own shock as much as anyone else’s, that I was something approaching the woman I might like to be.

“I was in the exact same place as you are,” I say, tears filling up my eyes. “I was lost for a very long time.” And even if she doesn’t understand, I can see that she believes me.

As for whether she’ll stop drinking or not, I can’t tell you. I have no idea. Every sobriety tale is a cliffhanger. None of us knows how our story ends.

But these conversations are good for me. They deliver me from my own sorrow. They remind me of my usefulness. They keep me from forgetting. How I got here, how I climbed out. I forgot too many things for far too long. Not just what we did last night, but who I was, where I wanted to go. I don’t do that anymore. Now I remember.

S
ARAH
H
EPOLA’S
writing has appeared in the
New York Times Magazine
,
The New Republic
,
Glamour
,
The Guardian
,
The Morning News
, and
Salon
, where she is an editor. She has worked as a music critic, travel writer, film reviewer, sex blogger, beauty columnist, and a high school English teacher. Her website is sarahhepola.com. She lives in Dallas.

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This memoir reflects the author’s life faithfully rendered to the best of her ability. Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of others.

Copyright © 2015 by Sarah Hepola

Cover design by Henry Sene Yee

Jacket photo by Herman Estevez

Cover copyright © 2015 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

Grand Central Publishing

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First ebook edition: June 2015

Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

The author is grateful to
Salon
,
Nerve
, and
The Morning News
, where some of the material in
Blackout
first appeared in a different form.

This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
by David Foster Wallace. Copyright © 2009 by the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust. Used by permission of Little, Brown and Company.

ISBN 978-1-455-55457-7

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