woozy with rainbows." When Don retired, they split their time between summers at the cabin on Duck Lake, MN and winters at their home in Mesa, AZ. I was galled by the PMRC, a group of concerned mothers led by the then-wife of Al Gore, Tipper Gore, fighting the cultural rot of songs about masturbation, virginity, BDSM, all the topics a curious girl might find irresistible. Speaking Topics And what I wish I could impart to someone is: If you can just get through that difficult first month, or two months, or whatever it turns out to be, I promise you, I swear to you, it is so much better on this side. Millers victims statement evokes the confusion, the shame, the soul trespass of this harrowing moment. From reading your book, that seemed to me like perhaps the time that was the hardest for you. Last year marked a low point for me. Oprah managed deep conversations with each of them, never pointing out that one account brushed uncomfortably against the other. Going against the online outrage machine could be career suicide. I had no boyfriend and practically no qualms about that. The #MeToo movement, which felt like a necessary corrective when it began, was starting to feel like an arrow pointed at our own agency. The Internet hates Franzen? He was not an online creature, despite being 29. In the pandemic madness of 2021, a journalist friend who enjoyed sounding off on science and homeopathy decided to stay the hell away from COVID. Right. Joan Didion, Carl Sagan, Christopher Hitchens, though I had more reservations about that last one. Artists were the weirdos and the scoundrels, the square pegs who never fit the round hole of society, and the result was typically a bucket of addictions, perversions, and bizarre predilections born of life on the outskirts. Course Syllabus School, What Is It Good For? He worked in a factory, with his hands. But such was the fierce community forged by booze that I feared exile. Steven Pinker Will ChatGPT Replace Human Writers? But admitting what Ireallythought, what Ireallybelieved about these complicated issues, I feared a similar exile. And what happens to the addict when he or she is in this place, is that the first week, or month, or in my case, year, are so bad that they keep falling back, keep falling back -- which I did for two years leading up to the moment that I quit. Five years ago this month, Sarah Hepola awoke to a scene that looked like just any other Sunday morning. Oprah had him on to talk about the book, and exactly two weeks later, she sat down with Chanel Miller, whose own memoir, Know My Name, had become a sensation. Political talking points dont lie neatly along human behavior. I was so proud of this small, private act of civil disobedience that I brought it home to Texas to show it to the younger man like a prized pelt. She is also survived by her grandchildren: Sarah, Brady, Matt, JJ, Jennifer, Greg, Joe, Danny, and Shane, along with her great grandchildren Runa, Hans, Asher, Bear, and Autumn. I have that line in the book: Activism may defy nuance, but sex demands it." Big in Finland. And a lot of us are trapped in that sorry place. There had been more grievous allegations, of courserape, pedophilia, physical abuse. Ours was not a moment to explore The Other Side. One of the common arguments made, at least about #MeToo scandals, is that the men (and women) behaving badly rarely face legal punishment. My point in all of this is: Hey, were having this explosive, important, necessary, fascinating, difficult conversation about consent. And when my friends stopped laughing because, you know, laughter is a complicity; its Im in this with you. When my friends stopped laughing, I was like, Oh wow, OK, this isnt so cool anymore., Each of my friends reacted differently to what was going on. You say that in your own life, "alcohol often made the issue of consent very murky." A human life is morally complex, filled with ambivalence and uncertainty, and accepting the quickly assembled dogma of social-media feeds lets us bypass messier realities that we ignore at our own peril. And though the area of expertise Id staked out as a writer was the complications of womens independence and the nuances of sex, and my own personal brand was blunt honesty, I could not bring myself to say word one about these episodes in public. Id spent the past five or so years watching celebrities, pundits, friends, and internet randos fall from grace for reasons as varied as sharing dumb jokes, making clumsy writing errors, accidentally showing their dong, and expressing controversial (though often widely held) opinions in the public execution chambers of social media. Sarah Hepola: When I first started thinking about writing a book, I went to Barnes & Noble in Union Square [in New York], and I went to the addiction section and read everything I could find.I found this book about women and drinking, and the upshot was that women hide their drinking and there are no social rituals about drinking for women the way there are for men. Blackout - Sarah Hepola Drunk Mom - Jowita Bydlowska Smashed - Koren Zailckas Unwasted: My Lush Sobriety - Sasha Zimmerman Scoblic Parched: A Memoir - Heather King The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath - Leslie Jamison Reply . There are uncomfortable dates, compromised friendships, and, most importantly, the inner critic that never shuts up. Outside on the sidewalk, he thanked me politely and sauntered off in the other direction, and I was left wondering why, indeed, we do these things. Its not about me -- she gave me a great gift by saying, and Im paraphrasing: This is actually about you; this is about your behavior. I toyed with the idea of writing about Brock Turner. Peak. The reviews were mixed, but the hits didnt really come, maybe because by the time his book came out, during the cresting wave of Black Lives Matter, the culture had moved away from #MeToo discussions, or maybe because nobody felt like tangling with Malcolm Gladwell. You mention that you were able to write off educational materials about excessive drinking -- like a student health center pamphlet, in college -- because they just didnt seem that realistic to you. To plant Memorial Trees in memory of Sarah Hepola, please click here to visit our Sympathy Store. My parents were Yankee liberals, only one of many ways we didnt fit. Your size might be different than my size. Atlantic. That might be why Ive so desperately sought the validation of people on Twitter Ive never even met. I kept going. Another topic you explore -- related to your own weight loss -- is body acceptance. But in silencing our own moral compass and strongly held beliefs, were hanging ourselves out to dry, rendering our wisdom and insight useless. Blackout by Sarah Hepola | Summary & Analysis Preview: In her memoir, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget, Sarah Hepola examines how she drank, why she drank, how others responded to her, and the misfortunes that occurred during her journey to sobriety. The next day, your brain will have no imprint of [your] activities, almost as if they didn't happen." But central to Millers despair is this: She could not remember what happened. He had a book coming out,Talking to Strangers, which included a well-researched chapter on alcohol and blackouts in the context of a college scandal I knew better than most, having met some of the people involved with the legal case. John Ford. Maybe it would get me into The New Yorker! Beginning. When I came out the other side of that, and I was sober and I was examining, Why did I drink so much?, one of the reasons was because I never felt comfortable in my body. And the writing community changed. We see Hepola scan an AA room for a potential boyfriend, gain fifty pounds by . But such was the fierce community forged by booze that I feared exile. Id get killed!, His look wasnt judgmental. Sally was very special and made friends wherever she went. She lives in East Dallas, where she enjoys listening to the Xanadu soundtrack and puttering in her garden, when she remembers she has one. Silent, fearful, aching to be heard, petrified of being misunderstood. I dont want to brag about where I am now. Her memoir, "Blackout," will be published by Grand Central on June 23, 2015. Im worried about you. Her past jobs include: Travel columnist, music editor, film critic, sex blogger, and for about 15 seconds in the late '90s, she taught high school English. But there was a . Me too. This interview has been edited and condensed. As a drinker and a snob, I had an allergy to educational materials, period. "You might think it's stupid, but I still think it's art." Because I wanted to talk to other writers about the things you cant write about anymore., His eyes narrowed. The reasons were simple, at least for me. That was another reason for the silence. She lives in Dallas. Sarah Hepola is the personal essays editor at Salon.com. Lets get blackout has been a college rallying cry for many years. Shes the host and creator of the Texas Monthly podcastAmericas Girls, an eight-part series on the lost history and cultural impact of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, a series that no less thanVogue magazine said expertly complicates Americas cheerleading obsession. Sarah never knew she was a cat person until she got a cat. And so I watched from afar as the person whose memory had not recorded the incident came to control the narrative. No jail time. By now the name Sarah Hepola should be familiar to you. On the master of precise prose, falling in love, and writing as an irrelevant act. Id think those would be the most interesting things to write about., I gave him an exasperated look. There was so much that was on the other side of sobriety that was so much better. Sarah Hepola tells me how in the 1990s while she was at the University of Texas it was important for her to "drink, dress, and fuck like a man". Do you have any advice for someone who is thinking about broaching the subject of drinking problems with a friend? And thats why, midway through a career built on speaking out, I shut up. Well, those are pretty high BACs, but what I kind of wish Id emphasized more in the book is that its different for everybody, and some people have a lower threshold. . Millers account was one of the most affecting pieces of writing I read that year. They were just telling me about their life, and I was like, Oh man, me too. Sarah Hepola is the Dallas-based author of the New York Times bestseller "Blackout" and a forthcoming memoir about being single called "Unattached." She also reported and hosted the Texas. If youve never experienced a blackout, it might be hard to understand the icy wrongness of waking up to find a blank space where three hours should be. I surrounded myself with people who reminded me I was loved, no matter what the firing squads on Twitter said. All Rights Reserved. Sarah Hepola The Things I'm Afraid to Write About by David Labaree March 24, 2022 Leave a Comment This post is a remarkable essay by Sarah Hepola, which appeared recently online at Atlantic. First, its a simply stunning piece of writing, which provokes in me feelings of both awe and jealousy. But I thought thats what writers do.. Id think those would be the most interesting things to write about., I gave him an exasperated look. I remember turning to the picture of Joan on the back, young and pretty and serious. Yes. Burial service for victims of the SS Atlantic shipwreck, April 1873. I carved out a journalism career during an era when that was not so hard to do. Not to engage in callouts, or scolding, or eye rolls, which are not my style, but to express my own deep ambivalence, my own point of view on subjects that matter to me. Yes, exactly! Or I would pause the recording to offer my own opposing view, like I was part of this conversation, and not the passive listener. I wanted people to love me without really knowing me, which isnt love. The couple next to me on my flight was headed to a wedding and staying with 81 people at an AirBNB. Something else might work for you, but just thought I'd share. That sounds really dramatic. I spoke to Hepola, a former colleague of mine, about drinking, body image, the politics of consent and what to do if you think you know someone who has a problem. Phone dates with writer friends in other parts of the country stretched to two and three hours as we worked out essays we would never write, toggling between outrage, despair, and armchair cultural analysis of the latest dustup. But being sympathetic to these fallen creaturesa trait instilled by literature, my mother, and Oprahhad been declared a sin. Sarah Hepola is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, "Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget."MORE FROM Sarah Hepola Mini Biography. I kept going. And I needed to feel comfortable in my body. Infused with sharp humor and carried along with elegant, brisk prose, Blackout traces the arc of Hepola's life, beginning when she was seven years old and snuck her first sips of Pearl Light from the family fridge in Dallas, "the land of rump-shaking cheerleaders and Mary Kay." After guiding us through her adolescent tribulations, first relationships, and drunken antics at the University of . But in silencing our own moral compass and strongly held beliefs, were hanging ourselves out to dry, rendering our wisdom and insight useless. One evening, I sat on the brown-leather couch of a younger man who admired me for my writing, and maybe other things, if the salty text messages were true. If youve never experienced a blackout, it might be hard to understand the icy wrongness of waking up to find a blank space where three hours should be. For press inquiries or to contact the author, click here. I was so proud of this small, private act of civil disobedience that I brought it home to Texas to show it to the younger man like a prized pelt. All around me, people were folding. When men are in a blackout, they do things to the world, he told me. And I knew blackouts so intimately that I literally wrote the book. Blackouts can be either partial or complete. BLACKOUT: Remembering The Things I Drank To Forget is the story of a woman stumbling into a new kind of adventure the sober life she never wanted. She went to St. But if this is someone really close to you, and who you care about, then I think you might want to say -- not something like youre drinking too much, because accusatory lines like that just bring up somebodys porcupine needles -- but, Im worried about you. . Were missing the chance to learn. Ask the Puritans. The notion that men were the ones who needed to changenot a bad idea, in my opinionhad a stubborn way of relinquishing women from the burden of their own choices and behavior. Oh, absolutely! There were the pressing matters of rent, exorbitant insurance, and the occasional glitter heels. I thought that my friendships were over, because alcohol had been such a point of bonding for us. Follow her on Twitter (@sarahhepola) and Instagram . And a lot of us are trapped in that sorry place. Part of HuffPost Women. But my cohort and I had grown up wanting it both ways: a safe career, and an artistic one. Sarah Hepolais the author of the bestsellingBlackoutand whatever she writes next. What was trauma, really? My book opens with an episode in Paris where I came out of a blackout in the middle of having sex with a man I did not recognize. You can call it cancel culture. Sarah Hepola Net Worth is $7 Million. Do you think the recent cultural push for acceptance and body love can actually make it harder for people to make a change? He had a book coming out, Talking to Strangers, which included a well-researched chapter on alcohol and blackouts in the context of a college scandal I knew better than most, having met some of the people involved with the legal case. H. Armstrong Roberts / ClassicStock / Getty; Gabriela The Things I'm Afraid to Write About A journalist whose delightfully combative Twitter account I read regularly, like an episodic novel. Shes the co-conspirator of Smoke Em if You Got Em, a weekly podcast on whats burning through the culture that she hosts with friend and fellow scribe Nancy Rommelmann. Not gonna die in that ditch today. Fewer open bars, more closed DMs. Is there anything that would have been helpful for you to hear, or that you would say to people who are in that stage right now? "This is a point worth underscoring, since the most common misperception about blacking out is confusing it with passing out, losing consciousness after too much booze. We spoke about her newly released first book Blackout: Remembering The Things I Drank To Forget, which is about a lifetime of drinking and the initial years of recovery. Which is one of the fundamental problems that alcoholics have to face: some people can keep alcohol in their life because theyre able to moderate it, but I could not. We are all unreliable narrators. ), Backstage at the Texas Book Festival event, I chatted with Gladwell. 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