Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

by Sarah Hepola

There was something untrustworthy about people who crossed their arms at the bacchanal.

To be both Irish and Finnish is to be bred for drinking—doomed to burst into song and worry later what everyone thought about it.

As much as my father was there during my childhood, he was also not there. He had an introversion common to Finns, and to engineers. He avoided eye contact. If he was growing up today, I’m curious what a psychiatrist would make of him. He had a boyhood habit of stimming, rocking back and forth to soothe himself. In his 20s, he had a compulsive blinking tic. In his middle age, he kept a notebook listing every winning Dallas lotto number, recorded in his careful, geometrically precise block lettering. A futile attempt at charting randomness.

My mother used to tell me all kids were struggling. Even the bullies. “It’s such a tough time for everyone,” she would say, and get a tsk-tsk look, like she was talking about Ethiopia. A nice perspective, I suppose. But I was pretty sure my unhappiness was worse than everyone else’s.

It was no small feat, turning a group of binge-drinking tailgaters against you.

There are wonderful reasons to become a journalist. To champion the underdog. To be professionally curious. Me? I just wanted to get free stuff and see my name in print.

People sometimes ask me how someone can drink so much and still keep her job. But drinkers find the right job. After