From: judgebean23x@gmail.com   
      
   Salon   
      
   SUNDAY, JUN 21, 2015 06:00 PM CDT   
      
   The drunkard's loop: How one writer fought her way back from blackout   
   alcoholism   
   LAURA MILLER    Follow   
      
   The drunkard's loop: How one writer fought her way back from blackout   
   alcoholism   
   Sarah Hepola   
      
   In her new memoir, Sarah Hepola sometimes sounds as if she's lived the dream   
   of hundreds of thousands of readers of those books with pink cocktail glasses   
   and high heels on their covers. She was a rock critic, a freelance writer in   
   Manhattan, sent to    
   Paris on assignments and surrounded by smart, loving friends. She's even been   
   an editor at this very publication, where she has assigned and published   
   personal essays of wit and power, helping other writers tell stories many of   
   us have found    
   unforgettable, as well as writing quite a few them herself. At work she was a   
   force of nature the way sunshine is, able to bring warmth, intelligence and a   
   sparkling energy to even the most lackadaisical afternoon meeting.   
      
   Sarah's closest friends, however, understood that she was also an alcoholic,   
   prone to episodes of total memory loss during which she said and did things   
   that often seemed wildly out of character. "Blackout: Remembering the Things I   
   Drank to Forget" opens    
   with its author in Paris, but also coming to in bed with a man she doesn't   
   even remember meeting in a room she doesn't recognize. It wasn't the first or   
   the last time Sarah had that experience, the sort of thing that she and her   
   friends once embraced as    
   fearless, feminist escapades. Less glamorous was waking up after a party   
   curled up in a dog bed.   
      
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   "Blackout" describes Sarah's efforts to find out how she came to lose so much   
   time, and the long and difficult road to a life she could call her own. It's   
   sad and funny and sometimes scary, but always infused with a radiance you want   
   to bask in. I    
   recently reached her by phone in Dallas, where she now lives, to find out more.   
      
   I'm not much of a drinker, so a lot of "Blackout" was news to me. I should   
   have known that there was a difference between passing out and having a   
   blackout.   
      
   It's amazing to me how common that misperception is, even among my most   
   educated friends. These are incredibly smart, well-read, sophisticated people,   
   and for years they have read the term "blacking out" and thought that it meant   
   passing out. I get why,    
   because it sounds like your brain wound down -- but it's very different.   
   You're still going.   
      
   There's some version of yourself, like a person who you don't even know, who's   
   in charge of the ranch and running around, doing stuff. Presumably it's some   
   part of you, even though she's doing things that you would never do if you   
   were sober. How long    
   can these periods last?   
      
   There's two kind of blackouts: fragmentary and en bloc. The fragmentary can   
   last a few minutes, five minutes, 30 minutes. The en bloc type, they can last   
   hours. The blackout that I write about from my college years, the one where I   
   was with friends in a    
   car and was mooning everybody? I believe that one was at least three or four   
   hours.   
      
   During which time you were conscious?   
      
   I was conscious. Just to be clear: When you're in a blackout, you can still   
   make decisions, and you're basically interacting like a drunk person would. I   
   presented as a drunk person, and I was making the decisions that a very drunk   
   person would make. But    
   the recorder in my brain wasn't going. So later, I have no memory of all this,   
   even though I was conscious at the time, which, to me, challenges the question   
   of what is consciousness. But, if you look at legal cases -- and this is a lot   
   of stuff that I    
   didn't get into in the book, because it has a lot of rabbit holes -- they've   
   determine that people in a blackout are responsible for their behavior.   
      
   But I get the impression that your behavior during a blackout was very   
   different from even your usual behavior when you were drunk but capable of   
   remembering.   
      
   It was. When I first found out that I had mooned everybody from that car, that   
   was the craziest the thing! I mean, I start that chapter talking about how   
   self-conscious I am about my ass. I used to wear a shirt tied around my waist   
   to cover that up! So,    
   what am I doing?! I did sometimes feel like, "Oh, this is an evil twin." But I   
   also think that I was a young person who didn't quite understand what alcohol   
   does to her. In a way, that person [during the blackouts] is very much me --   
   me without my    
   governors, me without any inhibitions whatsoever. I don't know what to say   
   about it, because some of this stuff is mysterious. There hasn't been that   
   much research about blackouts.   
      
   I come from a family of sleepwalkers, and it's similar; you don't remember   
   what you did, but you appear to be conscious to other people.   
      
   I just made the sleepwalking comparison yesterday, on NPR's "Weekend Edition."   
   I think it has parallels, but when somebody's sleepwalking, can't you see that   
   they're sleepwalking?   
      
   Well, it's easy to see that they're not their normal selves, and if it's   
   nighttime and you know they sleepwalk, you put it together. For example, when   
   I was a child, my sister came into bedroom and sat on the floor and started to   
   ask me a lot of    
   questions that were intelligible but made no sense. But her eyes were open,   
   she was walking around, and of course she had no memory of this afterwards. I   
   knew she was sleepwalking because it was night and she was in her pajamas and   
   there was a lot of    
   that sort of thing going on in our house. But if she had been walking down the   
   street and said those things to me, I might just have thought she was a crazy   
   person. People have driven cars and done all kinds of stuff while   
   sleepwalking, and I don't know    
   that anybody who saw them without those cues would know what they were doing.   
      
   Aaron White, the researcher I interviewed at NIAAA [National Institute of   
   Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism], said to me that blackouts look like early-onset   
   Alzheimer's.   
      
   Right, because you have just a few minutes of short-term memory and no   
   long-term memory?   
      
   Exactly, and that looks exactly like when somebody's hippocampus is snipped   
   out -- the guy in "Memento" had that.   
      
   So you can remember the last two or three minutes of what's happened, but then   
   after that you keep forgetting, so you keep repeating the same things over and   
   over again?   
      
   And that's the drunkard's loop, as a friend calls it!   
      
      
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