Women Who Drink
An excerpt from Sarah Hepola's "Blackout"
Sarah Hepola is a helluva writer, the kind who when I read her prose I want to abandon mine. If she drank like she writes, hoo doggy. The New York Times called her 2015 memoir, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget, “a win-win. She got a better life. We have this book.” She’s at work on her second book now. In the meantime, she graciously allowed us to run this excerpt, which is so good I want to cry.
by Sarah Hepola
I was 33, and lying on a futon in the middle of the day watching a talk show, because I could. I was a freelance writer in New York, and I was hungover, and try to stop me.
The show was discussing roofies. GHB, Rohypnol, the date rape drugs. This was 2007, but I’d been hearing about roofies since the late 90s: An odorless, colorless substance dropped into a drink to erase memory. Like something out of a sci-fi movie. I’d recently seen a network crime drama in which the heroine was slipped a roofie and woke up in a dangerous man’s house. Every once in a while, motherly types (including my actual mother) worried I might be vulnerable to this invisible menace. The talk show host, for one, was very concerned. Ladies, cover your drinks.
I had a different drinking problem, although I wouldn’t have used the word “problem,” at least not without air quotes. One morning, I woke up in the living room of a cute British guy’s apartment. The inflatable mattress was leaking, and my ass was scraping the ground in a plastic hammock. The last thing I remembered was walking my friend Lisa to the subway the night before. She held both my hands. “Do NOT go home with that guy,” she said, and I said, “I promise. Pinky swear.” Then I went back into the bar, and he ordered us another round.
This was the kind of excitement I wanted from a single life in New York, the kind of excitement I was hoping to find when I left Texas at the age of 31 in a Honda loaded down with books and heartbreak. I understood the city was not the shimmering fantasia portrayed by charming Audrey Hepburn movies and Woody Allen valentines and those four fancy ladies on HBO. But I wanted my own stories, and I understood drinking to be the gasoline of all adventure. The best evenings were the ones you might regret.
“I had sex with some random British dude and woke up on a leaking air mattress,” I texted my friend Stephanie.
“Congratulations!” she texted back.
Awesome. High-five. Hell, yeah. These were the responses I got from female friends when I told them about my drunken escapades. Most of my friends were married by this point. Sometimes they wondered aloud what being unattached in their 30s would be like. Careening around the city at 2am. Tilting the wide brim of a martini glass toward the sky to catch whatever plunked into it.
Being unattached in my 30s felt good. I wasn’t so lonely; reality TV was quite robust that year. Design programs. Chef programs. Musicians who used to be famous dating women who hoped to become famous. That roofie talk show made it seem like being a single woman was perilous, and you had to be on guard at all times, but I was numb to terror alerts by then. Whatever horror existed in the world, I was pretty sure GHB was not my problem.
Once, I’d gotten so blasted at a party I woke up in a dog bed, in someone else’s house.
“Do you think you got roofied?” my friend asked me.
“Yes,” I told her. “I think someone slipped me ten drinks.”
###
Books about alcoholism often talk about the “hidden drinking” of women. That’s been the line for decades. Bottles stashed behind the potted plant. Sips taken with shaking hands when no one is looking, because “society looks down on women who drink.”
I looked up to women who drink. My heart belonged to the defiant ones, the cigarette smokers, the pants wearers, the ones who gave a stiff arm to history. In college, we drank like the boys. After college, we hung around in dive bars with our male friends and later, when everyone grew lousy with expendable income and the freedom of having no kids, we drained bottles of Cabernet over steak dinners and debated the smoothest blends of Mexican tequila.
I joined a women’s book club when I was in my late 20s. It was called “Bitches and Books,” which seemed funny at the time. We gathered once a month, and balanced tiny white plates of brie and crackers on our knees as we discussed Ann Patchett and Augusten Burroughs and drank wine. Rivers of wine. Waterfalls of wine. Wine and confession. Wine and sisterhood.
Wine had become our social glue, the mechanism of our bonding. We needed the wine to shut out the jackhammers of our own perfectionism and unlock the secrets we kept within. Wine was the centerpiece of dinner parties and relaxing evenings at home. It was a requirement for work events and formal festivities. Let’s not even mention the word “bachelorette.” Friends moved their weddings out of churches and into restaurants and bars, where waiters served champagne before the bride had even appeared. The cool mothers had Chardonnay play dates and never let the demands of child-rearing keep them from happy hour. DIY sites sold onesies with a wink: Mommy drinks because I cry.
“Do you think you got roofied?” my friend asked me.
“Yes,” I told her. “I think someone slipped me ten drinks.”
I wrote stories about my drinking. Some were fiction, and some were painfully true, and I liked that my snappy comic tone made it hard to tell which was which. I wrote about getting wasted before 4pm (true) and waking up after a hard-partying musical festival next to Chuck Klosterman (not true), slamming shots with strangers and drinking queso from a to-go cup (more or less true). Women today are notorious for judging each other -- about how we raise children, about how we look in a swimsuit, about how we discuss race, gender, or class. Yet no matter how reckless or boozing my tales were, I never felt judged for one of them. In fact, I kind of thought women looked up to me.
By the late aughts, bumbling, blotto heroines were a staple of our narratives. “Bridget Jones’s Diary” was like a tree that had grown a thousand limbs. Carrie Bradshaw was a media empire. Chelsea Handler was building a savvy business brand playing the part of a woman much drunker and more foolish than she could possibly be. (Was there any book title more indicative of the moment than “Are You There Vodka, It’s Me Chelsea?” A longing for spiritual deliverance, the innocence of young adult literature, and Grey Goose.) My smart, successful female friends tore through their Us Weeklies, while New Yorkers piled on a corner table like homework, and followed the misadventures of the era’s party girls. In an age of sex tapes and beaver shots, there was nothing edgy or remotely shocking about a woman like me reporting that, hey everyone, I fell off my barstool.
I sometimes wondered what my mother thought. “Well, I think you exaggerate,” she told me once. In the personal essay I’d just written, for example, I mentioned having six beers. “I don’t think a woman can have that many drinks in one night,” she said. And my mother was right -- it was more like eight.
They added up fast! Two drinks at home getting ready, three drinks with dinner, three pints at the bar afterward. And those were the nights I kept count.
My mother never drank like me. She was a sipper. A one glass with dinner kind of lady. She tells me she cut loose at college frat parties, dancing in her bobby socks -- a phrase which suggests how wild she did not get -- but I’ve never seen her drunk and couldn’t imagine what it would look like. When her extended family got together, my rowdy Irish uncles gathered in a separate room, splitting a bottle of Scotch and laughing loudly enough to rattle the walls, while my mother and her sister took care of the kids. Screw that. I wanted to be the center of the party, not the person sweeping up afterward.
By the time I was old enough to drink, culture had shifted to accommodate my desires. For generations, women had been the abstainers, the watchdogs and caretakers -- women were a major force behind Prohibition, after all -- but as women’s place in society rose so did their consumption, and ‘70s feminists ushered in a new spirit of equal-opportunity drinking. Over the following decades, as men turned away from the bottle, women did not, which meant that by the 21st century, when it came to drinking, women had nearly closed the gender gap. A 2013 CDC report declared binge drinking a “dangerous health problem” for women 18-34, especially whites and Hispanics. Nearly 14 million women in the country enjoyed an average of three binges a month, six drinks at a time. That equates to a hell of a lot of book clubs.
It’s worth noting that the country, as a whole, is drinking less than we used to when alcohol hit its peak in the 1970s, the result of a higher drinking age and a shift away from three-martini lunches, among other factors. But a certain group of women have made booze a very public and very integral part of their culture. Young, middle-class, educated, drunk: That was life on the ground for me.
Nearly 14 million women in the country enjoyed an average of three binges a month, six drinks at a time. That equates to a hell of a lot of book clubs.
I thought nothing of spending most evenings in a bar, because that’s what my friends were doing. I thought nothing of mandating wine bottles for any difficult conversation -- for any conversation at all -- because that’s what I saw in movies and television. Glasses of white wine had become shorthand for honest communication. Clink, clink, here’s to us. I may have found the Hollywood empowerment tales of “you-go-girl drinking” to be patronizing, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t capture my value system.
Empowerment. It was an early buzz word for the 21st century. Throughout the aughts, everything from building schools in third-world countries to emailing pictures of your ass to strangers became empowering. For years, I kept an Onion story tacked above my desk: “Women now empowered by everything a woman does.” The word’s ubiquity suggested how much women wanted power, but how conflicted we were about getting it. Ripping your pubic hair out by the roots was empowerment. Taking Jagermeister shots at the bar was empowerment. I just wish those shots had empowered me not to trip off the sidewalk curb.
I did worry I drank too much. Actually, I had worried for a long time. I slipped in a club one night and bashed my kneecap. I fell down staircases (yes, plural). Sometimes I only skidded down a few steps -- gravity problems, I used to joke -- and then a few times I sailed to the bottom like a rag doll, and I’m not sure which is crazier: That I drank as long as I did, or that I kept wearing heels.
I think I knew I was in trouble. The small, still voice inside me always knew. I didn’t hide the drinking, but I hid the pain.
###
I was 20 years old when I first started worrying I drank too much. I picked up one of those pamphlets at the student health center. Do you have a drinking problem? I was in college. I was pretty sure everyone I knew had a drinking problem. My photo album was a flipbook of evidence: My friend Dave, with a bottle of Jim Beam to his lips. My friend Anne, passed out on the couch with a red Solo cup still upright in her hand. Heroic postures of sin and debauch.
But there was something troubling about the way I drank. Friends would inch-worm up to me on Sundays, when our apartment was still wrecked with stink and regret. Hey. So. We need to talk. They tried to sound casual, like we were going to chat about boys and nail polish, but the next eight words were like rusty darts lobbed at my face. Do you remember what you did last night?
And so, the pamphlet. It was such a corny, flimsy thing. It had probably been languishing on that rack of good intentions since the 1980s. The language was so alarmist and paternalistic (a word I’d just learned and enjoyed using).
Have you ever had a hangover? Come on. I felt pity for the wallflower who answered no to this question. Drinking at least three times a week was as fundamental to my education as choosing a major. My friends and I didn’t hang with people who didn’t party. There was something untrustworthy about people who crossed their arms at the bacchanal.
Next question: Do you ever drink to get drunk? Good lord. Why else would a person drink? To cure cancer? This was stupid. I had come to that health clinic with real fear in my heart, but already I felt foolish for being so dramatic.
Do you ever blackout?
Wait, that one. That question, right there. Do you ever blackout?
I did. I blacked out the first time I got drunk, and it happened again. And again. Some blackouts were benign, the last few hours of an evening turning into a blurry strobe. Some were extravagant. Like the one that brought me to the health clinic, after waking up in my parents’ house and having no idea how I got there. Three hours, gone from my brain.
During uncomfortable conversations with my friends, I would listen in disbelief as they told stories about me that were like the work of an evil twin. I said what? I did what? But I didn’t want to betray how little I knew. I wanted to eject from those discussions as quickly as possible, so I would nod, and tell them I felt terrible about what I’d done (whatever it turned out to be). The soft language of disarmament: I hear you. You are heard.
Other questions in the pamphlet were sort of ridiculous. Do you drink every day? Have you ever been sent to jail for your drinking? This was the low stuff of gutter drunks to me. I still shopped at the Gap. I had a Winnie-the-Pooh night lamp. No, I hadn’t been sent to jail, and no, I didn’t drink every day, and I was relieved to find those questions there, because they felt like they exempted me.
I was a college kid. I loved beer, and I loved the sophisticated sting of red wine, and I loved the fine and fiery stupor of bourbon, and sometimes I got so wasted that I poured those drinks on my head while performing songs from “A Chorus Line” in some twilight state I could not recall, and in the scope of the universe and all its problems, was this really -- really -- such a big deal?
I would listen in disbelief as they told stories about me that were like the work of an evil twin. I said what? I did what?
I didn’t quit drinking that day. Of course I didn’t. But I left the clinic with the notion that alcohol was an escalating madness, and the blackout issue was the juncture separating two kinds of drinking. One kind was a comet in your veins. The other kind left you sunken and cratered, drained of all light.
I figured if I stayed in the middle, in the grey area, I would be OK. Blacking out was bad, but it wasn’t that big of a deal, right? It’s not like I was the only person who ever forgot a night of drinking, right? And it’s not like it happened to me that often.
At a party I threw a few months later, a friend danced in my living room in a giant fish costume. The next morning, as we stared at the shiny fabric in a heap on the floor, she said: Why is that costume there?
I was flooded with gratitude. Not just me. Thank God.
In my 20s, friends called with that hush in their voice to tell me they’d woken up beside some guy. They called after forgotten wedding receptions where the open bar had proven a little too open. Not just me. Thank God.
In my early 30s, I used to have brunch with a sardonic guy who actually bragged about his blackouts. He called it “time travel,” which sounded so nifty, like a supernatural power. He wasn’t drinking too many Long Island Iced Teas; he was punching a hole in the time-space continuum.
I was laughing about my blackouts by then, too. I used to joke I was creating a show called “CSI: Hangover,” because I would be forced to dig around the apartment like a television crime scene investigator, rooting through receipts and other detritus to build a plausible theory of the night’s events. I imagined myself crouched by the bed, wearing those blue plastic gloves and picking up each questionable item with long tweezers. This crumpled wrapper suggests our victim was hungry, I would say, holding the foil in the light and then giving it a long whiff. And this has the unmistakable smell of a Beef Mexi-Melt.
It’s weird how a woman frightened by her own blackouts becomes a woman who shrugs them off like an unpaid cable bill. But any heavy drinker understands the constant redistricting and gerrymandering of what constitutes an actual “problem.” I’d come to think of blackouts as a surcharge for the grand spectacle of drinking. There was something deliciously chaotic about tossing your night up into the air and finding out the next morning what happened. Haven’t you seen “The Hangover”?
But there’s a certain point when you fall down the staircase, and you look around, and no one is amused anymore. By 35, I was in that precarious place where I knew I drank too much, but I believed I could manage somehow. I was seeing a therapist, and when I talked my blackouts, she gasped. I bristled at her concern. Her tone was alarmist, like the pamphlet I’d once read, but a trip to any keg party would illustrate that if blackouts doomed a person to alcoholism, then most of us were doomed.
“Everyone has blackouts,” I told her.
She locked eyes with me. “No, they don’t.”
Sarah Hepola is the author of the bestselling Blackout and the upcoming Unattached. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times magazine, Texas Monthly, Elle, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Guardian, Slate, and Salon, where she was a longtime editor. Follow her on Twitter at @sarahhepola.
Allison V. Smith took the photograph of Ms. Hepola.
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Headspace is a meditation app. I’ve used it for a couple years and am absolutely shocked at how much it’s taught me about managing my inner life. Try it free for a couple weeks. Don’t worry if you’ve never done it before. They talk you through it.
I now offer personal career coaching sessions through Need Hop.