Sarah Hipola (pictured) loved being a drunk. I
loved Sarah Hipola being a drunk too.
The title of Hipola’s book, Blackout:
Remembering The Things I Drank To Forget is ironic because, in fact, she
remembers practically everything, and tells us all about it in prose almost too
good for the topic. I guess when you’re as clever a wordsmith as Hipola, who
has been writing for salon.com for years, you just do.
Like some people who are more interesting when
their drunk, Hipola seemed more interesting when she was talking about being
drunk. Her drinking-and-drunk stories had the intensity of creeping by a really
bad wreck on the highway. Her getting-sober stories felt more like born again navel
gazing.
Raised in Dallas in a stereotypical middle income
family, Hipola claims she didn’t start drinking when she was seven years old
because of abuse or some other childhood trauma. She started drinking because
it was there, and she liked the taste. Her first blackout (a space in time
erased by alcohol poisoning) was when she was 11-years old.
She continued to drink, relatively unnoticed,
through junior high and high school. Then it was off to the University of
Texas in Austin, honing her writing skills at The Daily Texas (where
the sign on the door said, Where GPAs go to die), and The Austin
Chronicle, where being high was practically a job qualification. In
spite of, or perhaps because of, her drinking, Hipola managed to survive and
even hold down jobs. But at some point, the bar scene wasn’t enough (and
too expensive), and it became just her and her cat and her wine bottles, in bed, for days.
Over a period of about seven years Hipola staggers
back and forth between Alcoholics Anonymous and drunkenness, cigarette
chain-smoking, stinky clothes, ugly sex and lost time. Eventually AA and the
alcohol both wear her down, and her story starts to sound like the AA script
(There’s nothing to see here folks. Move along). And we stick with her to
the end, out of respect for her fortitude.
One thing I want to add is the issue of drinking
and sexual consent, which was brought up in Hipola’s book several times.
Although Hipola doesn’t specifically blame alcohol for her pretty messed up
sexual experiences, before and after sobriety, she does talk about it a lot.
More and more I see cases of rape, particularly involving college-age kids,
where blame is placed on alcohol – he or she drank too much and lost their
judgment.
And then there’s the blackout
expert who says to Hipola, When men are in a blackout, they do things to the
world. When women are in a blackout, things are done to them. When we tell
our daughters and sons to be discerning about when and how they have sex, we’re
assuming they won’t be drunk.
I recommend you read Blackout
because Sarah Hipola can string words and stories together in exquisite ways –
even when she’s talking about a disease that wrecks so many lives every day.
And I recommend you read it because it is a reminder there are family, friends
and strangers struggling with alcoholism in ways we can’t even imagine – and
that will hopefully make us more empathetic and kinder, and lord knows we
always need more of that.
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