Sarah Hepola’s Blackout: Since she reports “losing time” even when sober, her memory gaps may be like those seen in multiple personality, and not alcoholic

Ms. Hepola gives a long history of memory gaps for periods of time when she had been drunk but conscious, which certainly sounds like alcoholic blackouts. But to determine if these blackouts were truly alcoholic, it is important to know if she has also had memory gaps for periods of time that she has been sober. If she has, then the connection between alcohol and her blackouts may be coincidental.

In fact, she gives two examples of her having memory gaps when she is no longer drinking and is completely sober. If you read what she says too quickly or carelessly, you might think she is just giving examples of the saying, “Time flies when you are having fun.” But what she is trying to do is explain to us how great sobriety is, in that she can lose herself just as completely as she had when drinking, but now in a good way. She describes one episode as an example of “losing time” (a common expression in the multiple personality literature) and the other as showing how “pleasure shuts down the recorder in the brain.”

The first example is about her practicing the guitar. She says, “The afternoon could slip away when I was like this: three hours, gone without looking once at the clock. I loved being reminded that losing time didn’t have to be a nightmare. It could also be a natural high” (1, p. 211).

The other example is about a good sexual experience she had since being sober (in contrast to the bad sexual experiences she had had in her “alcoholic blackouts”): “The first time he and I had sex, I barely remembered it. The whole afternoon was white light and the dance of tree shadows through the windows. He kissed me on the couch, and then he kissed me on the stairs, and then I took him to my bed. And then time stopped…I always thought good sex without alcohol would be sharp with detail, saturated with color, but instead it was more like a 4 pm sun flare. Pleasure shuts down the recorder in the brain…For decades, I drank myself to reach that place of oblivion. Why hadn’t I known? The oblivion could come to me” (1, p. 197). 

1. Sarah Hepola. Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget. New York, Grand Central Publishing, 2015.