Sarah Hepola’s debut book is a coming-of-age memoir that explores her relationship with booze as if the liquid were a troubled and confusing, on-again off-again partner. Through her rendering of drunken afternoons, forgotten evenings and sick, ruined mornings, Hepola has occasion to discuss many hot-button literary and journalistic issues of the moment, including the nature of truth in highly confessional narratives and ethical problems surrounding intoxication and sexual consent. It’s a wry, self-deprecating story told with the bloggy rhythms you’d expect of a writer who has been covering pop culture for magazines such as Salon over the course of her career.

Hepola’s story is a more light-hearted take on what is becoming the classic addiction narrative: one that moves from a personal, inarticulable sadness into wild intoxication, staggers towards visceral guilt, and falls finally on that mainstay of the form – recovery. Her story contains moments of darkness and poetry, of course, such as when she recalls first getting blackout drunk at age eleven, how she formed the little rituals addicts use to keep from being discovered, and where she describes drinking as allowing for an otherwise impossible ‘Ecstasy when everyone is gone but still you are held.’

But Hepola’s vignettes aren’t the tales you’d usually hear at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, full of rage and sadness. Hepola instead finds humour and insight in her misadventures. Her core motif for doing so is in the titular blackout, that drunken state where long-term memories cannot be formed, the one that tends to separate those people you know who enjoy drinking from those people you worry about. Hepola, for many years a dedicated member of the latter group, is open about the irony and difficulty of constructing a memoir around a void, but it is this focus on anti-memories where the book succeeds in telling a different story about addiction. It’s a story where drinking can be an empowering activity – the natural psycho-chemical accoutrement to radical personal change – while it is also simultaneously the unwanted ghost that stalks and fogs her memories, her consent and eventually her identity.

David Litte