Sarah Hepola's Blog, page 6

What’s Next

Years ago, when I was finishing my first book, I got a solid piece of advice. Write your second book while waiting for the first to publish. A book often takes a year to go from final draft to bookshelf, and in that lag time, anxiety blossoms. Writing a second one fast, soon, now would be a way to surf the rocky down-time and assure productivity regardless of whatever came after publication, good or bad. Friends told me success could lock up a writer as quickly as failure, and I nodded, hoping that if I had to be struck by writer’s block, that would be the flavor I got.

Second books are a notoriously tricky business, much like second records or second films. There’s a reason we have the term sophomore slump. It’s easier to debut than to follow-up. As Elvis Costello once said, “You have twenty years to write your first album and six months to write your second.” I wasn’t on some punishing studio time line, but I still felt the crunch. “What are you working on now?” people asked me. “What’s next?”

Nevada

I did have an idea for a second book. It was vague, a subject more than a narrative, but books often start in mist and fog. I wanted to write about female solo travel. I’d begun traveling on my own at 25, frustrated that a boyfriend had not arrived, and I thought travel would be a way to explore the complications of my own independence, a freedom I had that previous generations did not, although other things had been lost along the way. That October, I headed through the desert Southwest and into California for a two-month road trip. Hiking, camping, alien crash sites, etc. I decided not to post on social media for the duration, because I was scared of doing that thing — that thing where you burn off your best material on the Internet and feel tapped when you open a word document.

I hoped such discipline would help me write more — but instead, I wrote nothing at all. I felt bad for this belly flop of productivity. I had so much free time, hours and hours of swallowing quiet. I sat in a tent on the woodsy northern rim of the Grand Canyon, and I did not write. I sat at a picnic bench near the orange-pink hoodoos of Bryce Canyon, and I did not write. I sat on the foamy shoreline of the Pacific Ocean, tossing jagged seashells into the lapping water, and I did not write. It turns out you can NOT WRITE in many beautiful locales. I listened to true-crime podcasts. I took selfies I did not send. I made recordings of the seagulls and the swooshing tide so that I might capture this feeling, this place, almost as though — being unable to appreciate the moment in the moment — I could appreciate it somewhere else down the line.

Los Angeles

The problem, or at least one of them, is that I had no idea where my life was headed. I was living in such uncertainty that I wasn’t sure what to say about anything. Would my book succeed, or prove a disappointment? Would I be loved, or scorned? My fate was dangling. Grief and loss are tremendous motivators. My misery has a very high word count. But I was neither miserable nor elated. I was just waiting. Wondering what’s next. I had recently turned 40, and my personal life felt dangling, too. I had never been married, never had children, despite always wanting both. How could I have lived four decades on the planet without these markers of an adult life? I thought maybe when the book came out, some mysterious man might appear at a book event, and — I don’t know. What’s next? I have often wished I wrote fiction, that my work was an act of imagination, of summoning — as opposed to an act of revisitation, trying to make sense of the past. Recently I mentioned this to a novelist, who gave me a funny look. What was her work, she said, but a revisitation of her past?

Anyway, I hated that road trip. And I felt guilty for hating the road trip, because it was kind of expensive and luxurious in a solitary single-person way, like the opposite of parenthood — all those empty afternoons, all those thick novels stacked in the trunk, the four-hour hikes, the nights spent in a roadside motel watching “Shark Tank” on basic cable. But it all felt like procrastination, an avoidance of real life. When I got back to Texas, friends asked how the trip went and I was like, “Ugh, I don’t want to talk about it.” Such a brat! But the mention of the trip brought up queasy feelings of creative failure, missed opportunity, and a stinging loneliness. I shelved the female solo travel book idea. Maybe later, but not now. I’d spent two months on the road with my own company, and mostly discovered I had nothing to say.

Blackout came out in summer 2015, and I was swept up in a wave of busy-ness that lasted for a while. It felt good, if no less anxiety-making. But people wanted to talk about my book, and so did I. My Google calendar filled with literary festivals, writing assignments, speaking engagements, and podcasts, so many podcasts. Half a year rocketed past. Around March, I posted on Facebook that I was heading to yet another book festival, and a novelist friend sent me a message gently suggesting it might be time to stop touring on that last book and get cracking on the second. The note was sent with love. She was worried I might get stuck, as she once had, and I said thank you and made a mental note that I later crumpled and threw in the trash. My paperback came out in summer 2016, and my Google calendar filled up again. I had always been the last one to leave a party, because A) parties are terrific and B) you never know when another party will come along again. What if this was the last party I ever got?

Patagonia

I had more ideas for a second book. Maybe I could write about modern dating, or women and sex, or American binge culture. I talked about these books, because talking about books is much, much easier than writing them, and in one case I wrote an entire proposal that I ended up pulling. Not good enough. I went out to California again; I wrote nothing again. A relationship I was hoping would develop turned out to not actually be a “relationship.” Everything was dissolving in my hands. I was exiting the life of a “successful author” and entering the life of an “unproductive freelance writer,” but I wasn’t sure what to do about it. I threw myself into a magazine piece that ended up getting killed when the editor quit. I threw myself into another magazine piece that fell apart a month into my research. These magazine pieces required dozens of hours of interviews and, in one case, a week-long trip to a college in Ohio that I paid for myself. My confidence was starting to founder. I tried my hand at a few internet “hot takes” only to find my takes were not that hot. This is a good start, the editor said, but I think we’ve missed our window. Or, This is a good start, but I think I’m more interested in x or y or z. I went from “What’s next?” to “Am I ever going to write again?” Twenty years in this business, but give me a string of bum luck, and I will start spiraling.

I kept most of this to myself. I kept to myself in general, which amplified the despair, since I had nowhere else to put it. I was traveling quite a bit during these years. Newfoundland, Iceland, Finland, Rwanda, but my world in between these dazzling locales was growing more grim. A gap was starting to appear between the life I presented online — itinerant, fortunate, filled with sustaining friendships and lucky-duck travel assignments — and the life I had away from the internet, which was solitary, sedentary, and consumed by artistic anxiety. I wasn’t lying about the good parts. I just didn’t know how to share the bad. Writing had been where I explored these vast middle grounds, but I wasn’t doing much of that, either. I was stopped-up and grumpy. The easiest way to communicate became not communicating at all.

Newfoundland

The year 2017 will not be remembered by many for its joy. In addition to whatever cataplectic fit the country was enduring, I was in a serious funk. I had an epic case of creative blue balls. Between the spring of 2017 and the winter of 2018, I worked on no less than six book proposals. (Unlike novelists, who usually sell completed manuscripts, nonfiction writers sell a book based on a proposal. For me, that generally amounts to one completed chapter and an outline of the rest of the book.) I loved all of those books. I named each one. I imagined their covers; I crafted their dedication pages. My beloved and insightful agent spoke with me for hours on the phone about each of them. She believed in them, too, and then listened — two weeks or two months later —  as I explained why this one wasn’t going to pan out. Sorry, maybe next time, though I was privately starting to wonder if there would ever BE a next time. Writing one book wouldn’t be a terrible thing. One book is more than most people ever write. I threw out lines for teaching gigs. I considered getting a nursing license. I contemplated the Peace Corp.

Many have written about the psychic ravages of writers block, but allow me to add one key gripe: It doesn’t pay. The book you work on for months only to prudently shelve: No partial fee for that. The paragraphs you spend days and days embroidering with the perfect metaphor only to scrap the entire project: No hourly wage. You get jack, you get zip, you get nada, and in addition to whatever mental and emotional turbulence this might have caused, there was a far more pressing concern, which is that not selling anything you write is VERY BAD FOR BUSINESS. I began fretting about money. I started using credit cards I had long ago paid off. My dad suggested I drive for Uber. This bothered the hell out of me, and then later I was like: Hmm, not such a bad idea.

Writing is not an easy job. People think that’s because the act of writing itself is hard, and it can be, but please understand how agonizing it is to NOT WRITE. It took a great deal of my energy to not write. It became a consuming obsession, an all-day task. I was thinking about NOT WRITING all the time.

Finland

Last October, I pulled myself out of the ditch, and I began working on the travel book again. I thought maybe I’d cracked the code. I worked on the book for long stretches of the day, seven days a week, 12-hour jags that were more like fugue states, and by January, I had 40,000 words. Half a book. I was giddy, and tired, and bloated with junk food. And I thought to myself: If this one doesn’t work, I’m going to stop trying for a while. But guess what happened next? IT DIDN’T WORK. And it was very hard to articulate why. The best reasons I had were vague, like the fizzing end to a relationship: Something was missing, it wasn’t quite there. A lot of “almost, but not quite.” I really thought I’d quit at this point, but I did not. Because by this point, real life had intruded, dragging along its emotional highs and lows — and I wanted to write about that again.

Two weeks ago, something happened that will change the trajectory of the next year of my life. I sold a book. I actually did! This is five years after selling my first book, four years after I began chastising myself for not writing my second, and a good two years later than I thought I would be selling the damn thing. The book will be published by the Dial Press, part of Random House, and I’m not going to say much more about it now except to tell you that it is not about travel, and it is not about modern dating, and it is not about American binge culture, although I can see parts of those books nested inside it. Passages that I wrote for one book ended up in the outline for this one, and ideas I was wrestling with in a much earlier context re-emerged in a much later one. I will spend the next year writing this book. It’s kind of funny — how long and hard I fought just to get to the place where it’s like, “OK, now you can begin.”

New Hampshire

So here I am at the beginning again. Starting again, as life continually asks us to do. I am relieved, and nervous, and grateful. I subscribe to the email newsletter Brain Pickings, which arrives on slow-moving Sunday mornings, a bit like literary sermons. Around the time I sold my book, I opened up the newsletter to find this from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.

Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!

I never did learn patience for the writing life. I had the drive, I had the ambition, I had the strong verbs and the rotary wheel of metaphors and the aching sensitivity and the drinking problem and the weird “look at me but don’t look at me” exhibitionism. But I never had patience. And I spent years at online magazines where patience was a liability, and my impatience was rewarded, and so now I am learning the hard way, which may be the only way we learn, the only way we overturn our comfortable habits of thought and behavior. Change is hard. Otherwise it probably wouldn’t be change.

I wonder if a more seasoned writer, a more disciplined journalist, could have made better use of this long and lonely valley from which I am only now emerging. Surely the answer is yes. And yet, when I look back at the past three years, I see someone trying her best. Reading, writing, traveling, studying the landscapes and the people, arguing with herself and others. And if I zoom out the lens and look at myself objectively, I think the answer is a lot less thrashing and dramatic than “I can’t write anymore” or “I am such a lazy piece or shit” or — give me a break, kid — “my career is over.” I think the answer is more like this: I was not ready.

I am now.

Scotland

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Paperback writer

Party girl, 1997 (photo Mary Elizabeth Heard)

Five and a half years ago, I started thinking I could write a book. Actually, I’d been thinking I could write a book since I learned it was a Thing You Could Do. A decent montage of my 20s and early 30s would be me, doing different things, wondering if they might become books. This road trip: Book deal? This teaching job: Potential book? You’d think the person who spent her life sniffing around for literary inspiration would spot opportunity when she finally quit drinking, but instead, I spent six months in that heartbroken state where you sink into tubs of creamy pasta and light candles for the memory of Stella Artois. One morning, during our call-in meeting at Salon, I told my fellow editors I was going to write a piece about quitting drinking the following week. Once I said it, I knew I had to do it. I am grateful to Salon for many reasons, but one is the fact that I could say this, on half of a whim, and nobody said: Are you sure this is a good idea? Have you started? What does it look like? They said, “OK, great.” The story came out on the evening of December 31, 2010, and in the days that followed, I started thinking: Huh, I wonder if this might be a book.

Five and a half years is a long time. Longer than college, or a presidential term. Five and a half years will give you a lot of opportunities to quit. It will give you many large banquet halls in which to explore your own deficiencies. I worried so much: I did not know how to do this. Not long ago, I went to an Arts & Letters Live interview with Hanya Yanigahara, the author of “A Little Life,” and she said: “It’s not necessarily the most talented writers who get published. It’s the ones who finish.” That’s it! That’s exactly right. All my life I’d been wanting to write a book, longing to write a book, panicking that I didn’t know how to write a book, but you learn to write a book the same way you learn to be a parent, or fall in love. The same way you learn to walk when you’re a little kid. You learn it as you go.

The paperback of “Blackout” comes out today. Tonight, at 7pm, I’ll be at BookPeople, one of the coziest book stores on the planet, with my dear friend Pam Colloff and hopefully some other people. I only have a few of these book appearances left before I close the chapter on what has pretty much been a year of talking about this book. San Francisco, June 9, Booksmith. Dallas, June 14, Wild Detectives. Marfa, June 20, Marfa Public Radio. LA, July 22, Book Soup. Thank you to everyone who supported me along the way, from near and far.

Writing a book has taught me a few things. Probably the number one thing is that I can write a book. That may sound stupid, but I can assure you it was my primary concern during those five and a half long years. Writing a book is not easy. It was marked by many moments of terror and frustration and doubt and embarrassment at the limitations of my own goddamn talent are massive. But in the end, I COULD do it.

And who knows? Maybe I’ll do it again.

Party girl, 2015 (photo by Tara Copp)

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What I’ve been up to lately

Last night I ran into an old friend, and she was like: Where can I find all the things you’ve written lately? I asked if she was on Facebook, and she was like, no I don’t do that, and I was like, YOU ARE SO SMART, and then I was like, but wait, where CAN you find all the things I’ve written lately? I used to have lists. I used to have compendiums. I used to KEEP this information somewhere, didn’t I? Now it’s all: Follow me on Twitter, friend me on Facebook, find me on Instagram. (By the way, find me on Instagram @thesarahhepolaexperience.) We’ve changed.

I told her I have a website, and she was like, OH GOOD, and then I was like, but I don’t really update it that much, and then I was like, BUT I WILL (thinking to myself, no you won’t). But I’ve proven my interior-monologue-self wrong this morning, because here I am, updating my website with some stories I’ve written lately — which is to say, like, in the past year.

Everything is Amazing, and Nobody’s Happy: a story about not meeting Louis CK

TV’s quiet 12-step revolution: how television is getting smarter about addiction

When you become the person you hate on the internet: My “Fresh Air” commentary about a social media faux pas

Going away without ghosting: Another “Fresh Air” commentary about grown-up ways to say “I’m not that into you”

This Is the Most Remote and Magical Hotel on Earth: A story about Fogo Island Inn in Newfoundland, and although headlines are notoriously overdramatic, this one fits

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Oh hi, I didn’t see you there

It’s a little more than a month from the paperback release of “Blackout.” I’m updating this site with paperback tour dates, although the “tour” will be less of a direct hit and more of a rolling wave. Dates have been set in June for Dallas, Austin and San Francisco, with dates in LA, NY, and DC to come in the mid-summer and fall. Maybe other cities, too? I’m open.

I’m going to start updating this creaky old blog, too. Maybe I’ll share stories about the past 11 months. Maybe I’ll share some of my secret insecurities, self-defeating habits, coursing anxieties, and recipes for my favorite peanut-butter chocolate dessert (Hershey bar, jar of Jif). The point is that we’re going to be getting closer again, you and me. We’ve been apart for too long. As Tom Waits sings, “If you get far enough away, you’ll be on your way back home.” Here I am. Home again.

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“Blackout”: Remembering the Media and Events I Forgot to Tell You About

On Tuesday, June 23, my first book, “Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget,” comes out. The following is for people who would like to play along.

BOOK EVENTS

Tuesday, June 23, McNally Jackson in New York City, 7pm

Thursday, June 25, Barnes & Noble Lincoln Park in Dallas, 7pm

Friday, June 26, BookPeople in Austin, 7pm

EXCERPTS

Elle Magazine, “Like a Virgin”

The Guardian, “Everyone has blackouts, right?”

REVIEWS

Kirkus Reviews: “A razor-sharp memoir that reveals the woman behind the wine glass”

Publishers Weekly: A “valiant, gracious work of powerful honesty”

More magazine: “Hepola avoids the tropes of the “getting sober” confessional and takes us into unexplored territory”

BookPage: “Her true bravery emerges in this memoir’s witty candor”

BEST OF THE SUMMER LISTS

People Magazine’s Top 12 books of the summer

Amazon’s best books of June

O Magazine, the season’s best biographies and memoirs

Los Angeles Times‘ 27 nonfiction books to check out this summer

Bustle Magazine’s Perfect Summer Escapes

iTunes best 20 books of June

Dallas Observer

INTERVIEWS

Elle Magazine

Soberistas

Mixed Media podcast

AND OTHER THINGS

Book trailer

“Lush for Life” reading, Oral Fixation

Video of me talking about the book in someone else’s tasteful apartment

Important footage of squirrel dropping nut

For poor women who have been tempted to sin by rum, 1878 version

“Men can reform. Society welcomes them back to the path of virtue; a vail is cast over their conduct, and their vows of amendments are accepted, and their promises to reform are hailed with great delight. But, Alas! For poor women who have been tempted to sin by rum. For them there are not calls to come home, no sheltering arm; no acceptance of confessions and promises to amend. We may call them the hopeless class. The drunken man can throw down the filthy cup and reform; he can take his place again in society, and be welcomed back. But for poor woman, after she once becomes debased by this fiery liquid, there seems to be no space for repentance; for her there is no hope and no prayer. How seldom we attempt to reach and rescue her! For her there is no refuge.”

— Eleven Years a Drunkard, or the Life of Thomas Doner: Having Lost Both His Arms to Intemperance, He Wrote This Book With His Teeth, as a Warning to Others … (1878) 

For an alternate perspective on female alcoholism, click here.

And sometimes, we do interviews

As a woman in my early 20s, I was always trying to get over the last guy I dated. I was very loyal to my own heartbreak like that. When I started having drunken sexual encounters with men, it felt like I was getting back at guys who had dumped me. It felt like triumph. Absolutely my friends were doing this, too. The conversations we had the next morning were not, like, oh I’ve done this shameful thing. It was more like: Hell, yeah. I’m back. Those conversations were also laced with a romantic self-mythology.Oooh, I had a “one-night stand”. Look at how cool and evolved I am.

Read more of my interview at Soberistas, a site for sober women in England.

Whatever path you choose or whatever path chooses you

The Tibetan handmade gifts store is right around the corner from my old apartment in NYC. I went inside on my last visit, because my yoga-loving, slightly Buddhist mother had been charmed by this store years ago, and she had a birthday coming up.

“Let me know if I can help you.” The woman behind the counter is small, in her 50s.

I don’t even know what these things on the shelf are. Intricate incense holders, bells, statues of icons I can’t identify.  “I’m looking for a gift for my mom,” I say.

“Does she have one of those?” She picks up a wide metal bowl with engravings on the outside. She runs a small black mallet along the lip and the bowl emits a sound that is otherworldly. Part angels, part spaceship. The hair on the back of my neck stands up. A singing bowl. I thank her and tell it is perfect. We chat as she packs it in newspaper for my flight home.

“Are you married?” she asks.

“I’m not,” I say.

“Ever been married?”

“Never,” I say. I didn’t mean to be a 40-year-old single woman. It just happened, I often say, although that isn’t quite accurate. Choices were made. Priorities were kept. It doesn’t bother me most days, and then some days, I’m like: What the hell?

“I have two daughters like you,” she says. “They’ve never been married.”

“Does that frustrate you?” I ask.

“Oh no,” she says, eyes wide, shaking her head. She explains that she was married at a young age. I can’t remember the age she told me now. Maybe 20. Maybe 18. She says she didn’t know him at the time. He’s a nice man, but still. They came to America soon after they wed, and she cried every night for years. Her eyes mist up at the memory: So much of her life, determined by someone else. She tells me she used to call her mother back home, but she would never let herself cry. “I didn’t want her to know,” she says.

“I understand,” I say. I have tried to protect my mother from painful knowledge, too, the same way my mother has tried to protect me.

“I wanted a different life for my daughters,” she says, handing me the package. Choice. The choice of their own lonely path, or triumphant path — whatever path they choose or whatever path chooses them. “Your mother will love that,” she tells me. And she was right.

Little slips of paper that might have contained your future

In my senior year of college, I took a playwriting class. We were given slips of paper with dramatic scenarios and told to write a few pages of a scene. It’s been nearly two decades since I read the information on that strip of paper, selected from a pile, and though I cannot be certain, what I remember is that my scenario was about a female rock singer in a hotel room who comes out of a drinking jag to make a startling discovery. She is holding a gun in her hand. The name of the play: BLACKOUT.

It must sound like I’m making up this story. How contrived to think that a fake play scenario a person drew randomly in class would have the same name of a memoir that person would write nearly 20 years later. Life doesn’t work like that, right? But let’s all concede, for the sake of argument, that we don’t really know how life works.

I’d just turned 21, and I’d had a few blackouts from drinking. They were some of the creepiest parts of the otherwise spectacular drinking life — you’d wake up, and someone would tell you things you’d done, like some “Twilight Zone” episode where your body is invaded by another life form, one who likes to eat raw hot dogs and flash her bra. Of course, “blackouts” are also the end to every scene in a play, the key transition on the stage, which led to an epiphany: What if this character’s alcohol blackouts were signaled by the play’s lighting blackouts? And then: What if the whole play were taking place in her mind?

I was into experimental theater, experimental fiction. A straightforward narrative — a guy, a girl, a story that moved from beginning to end — bored me. “Pulp Fiction” had come out the year before, and blown our collective minds. We all wanted to be Tarantino, turning the plot around like a kaleidoscope. My heroes were twisty like that. Durang, Stoppard, Tim O’Brien, the New Journalism gods. (My writing heroes were all men.)

I wrote a few pages of the scenario, and then, as encouraged by our instructor, I changed some parts of the scenario to better suit my interests and continued to write the entire play. The rock singer became an actress. The gun became a cigarette lighter she kept trying to ignite. I kept the hotel, and I kept the blackouts, and because I was enduring my own breakup, I added a storyline about a guy she’d met, and maybe fallen in love with, or maybe that was all in her mind, because: Tricks.

I did not call the play “Blackout.” It seems insane to me now that I ditched that title, written to me on a slip of paper like a fortune inside a vanilla cookie. I remember thinking the title “Blackout” was a little corny, a wee melodramatic. Blackout! BLACKOUT! It sounded like the title of an old pulp thriller, where the town loses electricity and someone nefarious is on the loose (and what if that someone is … YOU?). I struggled mightily to come up with another title. It was like coming up with a band name. Nothing sounded right, everything good had been taken. I eventually called the play “Inside Voices,” which is a soft and mysterious title, not nearly as attention-grabbing as “Blackout,” but I was quite invested in the whole “interior reality / is it real or imagined?” stuff, so I guess it worked.

My friend Bryan and I produced our plays the following year (my second senior year), and our theater friends acted in them, and it was fun. I felt like the first person in history to equate alcohol blackouts with theater blackouts, and maybe I was, or maybe some clever binge drinker comes along every two years and does the same thing. I don’t know.

In my 20s, I gave up theater. I moved toward journalism, and ultimately, first-person narratives, a form that would have elicited a blank stare in college because back then, writing about your own puny life was an act of creative bankruptcy. (Never mind that all writers write about their own lives, just in different ways.) But the more I wrote about myself, the more people seemed to like what I was writing. And the more people liked what I was writing, the more I did it. Writing was about connection as much as the delivery of ideas and opinions, and acknowledging my own internal reality — I’m nervous, I’m conflicted, I’m stuffed with too much deep-dish pepperoni pizza — turned out to be a decent career move. I kept getting writing gigs, and I kept drinking, and I kept having blackouts, and 15 years passed that way.

I was 36 when I decided to write a book about my drinking. I was less than a year sober, fragile but grasping at any rope, and I didn’t know what the book would be about exactly. I was in that frustrating, muddy place, where you have the shadow of an idea but not the language: It’s about, umm, drinking, and umm, women, and umm, how that whole thing works? I sent a batch of pages to a woman in the publishing industry, and she said to me: Your book should be about blackouts.

It was like lightning struck over my head. Of course my book should be about blackouts. This was so obvious: Blackouts had plagued me, I still didn’t know much about them, they had narrative drama and rich metaphorical value. Why didn’t I think of this? I still marvel at the clarity of her suggestion. How is it that a stranger reading about your life for the first time can somehow see your story more clearly than you can see your own?

Over the four years since then, I have heard many opinions about my book. Some good, some bad, but what everyone I have ever spoken with seemed to agree on was the title. “Great title,” they tell me. I went through a low period that lasted close to a year, where I really wasn’t sure what I was writing about anymore or if I would ever finish, but I held on to that title like driftwood on a churning sea. I loved the way people’s eyes sparked when I said the words, and the conversations would result. What IS a blackout? Why do some people have them and not others? Isn’t that bizarre — that you can do something, and not remember it? What the hell IS that anyway?

“The mind is a forgetting machine” I heard someone say on the radio the other day. He was talking about memory, how it changes as we age, how we let go of so much more information than we ever retain. And he’s right. For instance, for most of the years I was working on my book, I completely and totally forgot about the college girl who pulled a piece of paper out of a pile with the words “BLACKOUT” written on it. I forgot that the opening scene of my book is jarringly similar to that scenario: A hotel room, a woman, a drinking jag, a startling discovery.

It was my friend Bryan who reminded me. “Is your book going to mention that you wrote a play about blackouts?”

Oh, my God, that’s right: I did. And while my book did mention that in one draft, it was removed in the next, because it proved a bit confusing. So I’m putting it here now, for a future me who might forget. I’d like to remember that once upon a time, I pulled a slip of paper out of a pile that contained my future, and it took me about 15 years to realize it. That makes me wonder: What other accidental prophecies have I thrown away?

The book comes out June 23. My review in Publishers Weekly can be read here.

“I fear I’m becoming undateable”: Letter to a young sober woman

After my story about dating sober ran in Elle Magazine, I heard from other women also learning to navigate the Tinder era without a glass of wine in their hands. I know many ladies (and gentlemen) struggle with these issues, too, so I asked one of them if I could share our correspondence, and she agreed. (I’ve removed her name.) Her letter, and my response, is below.

I just gave up drinking, mostly bc of a health problem but I related way too much to your saga of relying on alcohol to guide romantic interactions and now that I tell men I don’t drink, I fear I’m becoming undateable. So my question to you is, can I show up to the date at a bar and tell them THEN and just sip a water while they have a beer? I feel like most guys don’t want to drink in front of a sober person, makes them feel predatorial like “c’mon, I can’t drink alone!” so I’ve been telling men before the date that I don’t drink and suggest coffee or food and they seem completely put out and often times cancel on me, because to them, I’m just a coffee date, I’m not a real date aka they won’t get laid on a coffee date. So how do you even get them to meet you!? I’m leaning towards not saying anything and when they undoubtedly offer to meet for drinks I just show up and order a water and hope they don’t mind drinking alone. Le sigh, anyways I’m sure you’re fielding actual pitches and not quarter life crises from weird sober single women, but anyways your article really spoke to me during a time I was panicking I would never meet a man ever again. Thank you!

I actually love hearing from weird sober single women. They are some of my favorite pen pals. Weird sober single women have to stick together, because we have something that bonds us in a world where so many people are the same. Most of the dating world looks like this: Have a drink or three while you’re getting ready (nervous! feelings!), have a drink or three at dinner (OMG do I like him? does he like me?), have a drink or three at the bar afterward (shit, should I go home with him? should I sleep with him?). Here’s what the dating world looks like for you: NOOOOO DRIIINNNNKING. It’s just you, and the volcano of your nervous, uncomfortable feelings, and nothing to save you but a glass of Canada Dry. Wow. No wonder you’re panicking. I did, too.

But before I respond to your questions, I need to assure you: You are not undateable. Or rather, the only way you could be undateable is if you made yourself that way. I chose that for a while. I put up the force field and holed up on my couch with my documentaries and my creamy pasta. Being undateable was magnificent. Nobody could hurt me. Eventually, though, I needed to push myself out there again, and as if the dating world weren’t cruel and torturous enough, I had become a tainted woman — a woman who doesn’t drink. Le sigh, indeed.

Women who drink are cool. Women who drink are fun. Some of my favorite women — famous and in real life — are drinkers, which is part of why it meant so much to me to be one of them. When I gave up drinking, I thought it meant that I became the opposite. I was NOT cool. I was NOT fun. This is a lie. I have seen many women get sober now, and I know they only get better: Their hearts grow in surprising ways. They become more reliable friends, better listeners, kinder and more forgiving people. They are as cool as they’ve ever been. Sometimes even cooler. It’s true that a very small number of them are banging the dude they just met on OKCupid, and if that’s what a guy is looking for — the maximum fast track to banging — then a sober woman is, indeed, probably not the right match. To him we say: Good riddance.

I know it doesn’t feel this way, but guys who won’t meet you for coffee are doing you a favor. They just saved you time and effort by telling you exactly who they are, which is someone who has no interest if sex is not on the table immediately, which is a small-minded, douchebag way to be. Or maybe these hypothetical bar-only men are not douchebags. Maybe they’re just heavy drinkers like I used to be, who struggle with shyness and insecurity and have passionate feelings about artisanal brews and can’t even conceive of being close to a person without a drink in their hands. I’m sorry, but that person is not a good romantic partner for you right now. You are staring down an undisclosed health issue (possibly a big deal) and the major lifestyle change of no longer drinking (definitely a big deal). You need more from the men you date, not less.

My standards were not always so high. I’m not talking about my boyfriends — good-hearted, funny, challenging men — but the ones who came in between. Those guys. The ones I sometimes met in a bar and banged. I liked the drama of having men around, even questionable ones, because it made me feel desirable and exciting. When I quit drinking, I had to give up the idea of hanging out with those guys for three or four weeks, maybe-sorta seeing if my feelings changed, if something magical happened to make me like them more, or vice versa. When you stop drinking, you lose the luxury of such pretending. This turns out to be a small sacrifice. The dating world is a large majority bullshit, and it’s not such a bad fate to cut down on your slice of bullshit pie.

How you choose to disclose your sobriety — and where you want to meet men you date — is a personal decision, and I wouldn’t presume to know what was right. I liked getting it out of the way; other people keep it under the hat. I can make arguments either way. But I noticed you’re quite worried about making your date comfortable, and my question to you is: What makes YOU comfortable? You are doing a very hard thing. You are not drinking in a drinking world. Do you WANT to be in a bar? Comfort is essential to you now. You can no longer drink your way out of a bad date, which is how half the other folks on OK Cupid will spend their Friday nights. It was a while before I felt comfortable meeting guys in bars, but now that I do, I find it’s not a big deal. I get a seltzer, he gets a beer, and we talk. Now, is the guy thinking to himself, “Man, this sucks. We can’t get wasted and fuck.” Maybe. But does it occur to anyone — does it occur to you, now that you’re seeing things a little more clearly — that “getting wasted and fucking” is a questionable way to get to know someone?

You are about 25. I am 40. I am lucky on this dating beat, because men I go out with have often been knocked around by life in a way that has beaten out the weaselly, asshole part of them. They have had a divorce, maybe even two, a layoff, some hair loss. They have had their heart stomped on, which turns out to make them MUCH better dating material. Would you consider dating an older man? Would you consider dating a sober man? Both of those guys can make very good dating material. Because the good news is — the way in which YOU are lucky — is that you are 25. Twenty-five! That’s the most dateable age on the planet! My friend, if I can date at 40 — which is NOT, I assure you, a “dateable” age, but more like the age when all your female friends remove the year they were born from their Facebook page — then you can date at 25. It’s a simple fact that by quitting drinking, your dating pool just got smaller. So it’s time to reconsider your dating pool.

I spent a lot of my younger years worrying if men liked me. A roomy section of my brain was roped off for this purpose. Did I wear the right thing? Does he think I’m hot? Is he having a good time now? When I got sober, that question turned around a bit. I started wondering: Am *I* having a good time now? Is he worth all this trouble? I found that the answer was often no. I met a lot of interesting men, but they were not interesting enough. Often we wanted different things. Many of them wanted to date a woman who was drinking, which is a little bit like telling me you want to date a tall, dark-haired, exotic woman named Linda. That’s fine. It’s just not what we have in stock right now. Not dating those guys freed me up to find someone who might be interested in a short, blonde, non-exotic girl named Sarah. It’s all I have to offer.

Here is another truth. You will be shocked how many people don’t drink. They don’t drink because of medical diagnoses, they don’t drink because they don’t like it, they don’t drink for religious reasons, or because they come from a country where pouring golden liquid down your throat until you puke is seen as not that awesome of a thing to do. Many people are comfortable not drinking — they can take it or leave it. Maybe it doesn’t seem that way right now, because you are young, and surrounded by people who consider binge-drinking three nights a week to be some kind of constitutional right, but as time passes, and you grow more comfortable with yourself (an inevitable and beautiful outgrowth of sobriety), you will find these other magical people, who don’t require liquor to explore the world. They will be interested in taking walks, and laughing at how bad they are at bowling, and sitting in coffee shops for three hours at a stretch because neither of you was watching the time. Falling in love sober is the greatest. THE greatest. And the truth is, I fall in love sober all the time: With new friends, with new songs, with the blue sky, with Louis CK sketches and Joan Didion lines, and every once in a great long while, with a human person. 

People who stop drinking have the opportunity to find calmness and acceptance in ourselves. I’m not going to lie to you. It’s hard. But the truth is, dating was hard when I was drinking, and it was hard after I quit. You are not undateable. What you are, however, is a person who is no longer like the rest of the herd. You are blue in a green world. This can be terrifying, traumatizing — and it can free you up for a life that is better than you ever dreamed.