What It's Like When Alcohol Takes Over Your Life -- And Steals Your Memories

There are some crucial details missing from Sarah Hepola's new memoir, Blackout -- but that's the whole point. In her book, released in June, the author -- who edits personal essays for Salon.com -- discusses her long, both complicated and sometimes devastatingly simple relationship with alcohol. It started early (she first stole sips of beer at age 7), and blazed a destructive path through several decades of her life. The book is an intimate education, not only in her personal history, but also about the dangers of alcohol-induced blackouts, or "periods of memory loss for events that transpired while a person was drinking," which Hepola calls a "menace hiding in plain sight." When she was having a blackout, Hepola explains, she could appear to be interacting with the world consciously -- but afterward, she would have no memory of what had happened. At one point, for example, she came out of a blackout while having sex with someone she didn't recognize: "It's like the universe dropped me into someone else's body. Into someone else's life. But I seem to be enjoying it. I'm making all the right sounds." "[P]eople in a blackout can be surprisingly functional," she writes. "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. But in a blackout, a person is anything but silent and immobile. ... The next day, your brain will have no imprint of [your] activities, a...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news