“The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath” by Leslie Jamison: Author repeatedly mentions her memory gaps, her allegedly alcohol-induced blackouts

The Recovering is a “deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and reportage” (front flap). “Blackouts,” listed in the index (1, p. 524), are mentioned on nineteen scattered pages. 

Jamison considers her blackouts to be a notable phenomenon, sometimes a memorable experience, but something so ordinary for alcoholics to have that she mentions them mostly in passing, for example:

“If I had to say where my drinking began, which first time began it, I might say it started with my first blackout, or maybe the first time I sought blackout, the first time I wanted nothing more than to be absent from my own life. Maybe it started the first time I threw up from drinking, the first time I dreamed about drinking, the first time I lied about drinking, the first time I dreamed about lying about drinking…” (1, p. 6).

What she does not say on any of those nineteen scattered pages is whether she has ever had a blackout for a period of time when she had not been intoxicated.

Some drinkers occasionally do have what they assume to be alcoholic blackouts for periods of time that they had not been intoxicated. But they usually do not mention such “dry blackouts” unless you specifically ask if they’ve ever had them, because their dry blackouts may be relatively short and less dramatic, and may be rationalized as delayed aftereffects of past intoxication.

But memory gaps for any period of time that the person had not been intoxicated are not alcoholic blackouts. What else could they be?

Memory gaps, even if they occur for a period of time when the person had been drinking, may be a symptom of multiple personality. Indeed, a person’s biggest memory gaps may occur for periods of time that an alternate personality who drinks had taken over. But since people with multiple personality almost always have more than two personalities, there will also be other, often shorter and less conspicuous, memory gaps for periods of time that a non-drinking alternate personality had taken over.

So whenever an alcoholic has memory gaps for periods of time that they had been intoxicated, consider whether or not they have also had memory gaps for periods of time that they had not been intoxicated. The latter, as far as I can tell from the index, is not considered in Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering.

Search “blackouts” and “memory gaps” in this blog for the many past posts that discuss these issues, with examples in the work of various novelists.

Leslie Jamison is a novelist. I plan to read her novel, The Gin Closet (2010), in the future.

1. Leslie Jamison. The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath. New York, Little Brown, 2018.