Blackouts in “The Gin Closet” vs. “The Recovering” by Leslie Jamison (post 2): The novel uses “blackouts” in ways that suggest multiple personality

In my previous post, on Jamison’s nonfiction book, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath (2018), I noted its failure to ask whether some alcoholics might also have “dry blackouts”: memory gaps for periods of time when they had not been intoxicated.

An alcoholic who had both wet and dry blackouts would probably have both alcoholism and multiple personality.

So I planned to read Jamison’s novel, The Gin Closet (2010), for comparison.

I am halfway through the novel, which has two main characters, Stella and her aunt, Tilly, who are first-person narrators of alternate chapters. Blackouts have been mentioned by both characters.

Tilly is a severe alcoholic, who has been known to drink gin in a closet, literally. Her blackouts—“One morning I woke up on the bathroom floor. I couldn’t even remember how I’d gotten there” (1, p. 81)—are explicitly during times of intoxication.

Stella describes herself as psychologically split into multiple parts: “I was just organized into little sections inside. The sections didn’t touch each other, necessarily. I hadn’t seen some of them for a long time” (1, p. 21).

She, too, has had blackouts, but when she mentions them—“Blackouts took moments of my life and hid them from my sight” (1, p. 121)—it is when telling the story of her history of anorexia nervosa, a story in which she does not mention intoxication.

So Stella has had “dry blackouts”: memory gaps without intoxication, which are the kind that are typical of multiple personality.

Of course, a person with multiple personality can have both kinds of blackouts if they have both drinking and nondrinking personalities.

Tilly’s blackouts, which do occur during intoxication, nevertheless raise the possibility of multiple personality, because her drinking behavior is so peculiar. She drinks in the closet of a place where she lives alone.

What could explain such odd behavior? [I can only speculate:] It might be the behavior of a drinking, alternate personality, who originated in childhood (multiple personality starts in childhood), when Tilly might have started her drinking in a closet, so her mother wouldn’t see it.

1. Leslie Jamison. The Gin Closet. New York, Free Press, 2010.