“Floor Sample: a creative memoir” by Julia Cameron: Writer, whose alcoholic blackouts could be prevented by stimulants, becomes conduit for creativity

Julia Cameron is a novelist, playwright, songwriter, and poet, with extensive credits in theater, film, and television. She is best known for her book on creativity (1). Before reading the latter, I have begun her memoir, the first quarter of which is mostly about her overcoming alcoholism, which featured alcoholic blackouts.

Her blackouts were unusual in two respects. First, she had a blackout the very first time she drank. Second, she could drink, but avoid blacking out, if she took a stimulant drug, either amphetamine or cocaine.

When I looked up alcoholic blackouts, I found that most sources do not mention stimulants, but that those which did said stimulants would make blackouts worse, probably by allowing the person to drink a greater amount of alcohol.

Her Blackouts

“ ‘I was what, in retrospect, I call a Cup o' Soup alcoholic; I had a blackout the first time I went drinking and most people don’t,’ she says” (2).

“At eighteen years of age…Drinking white wine spritzers, I had my first alcoholic blackout. A blackout is a period where although the drinker appears to be acting normally, his or her memory ceases to record. Blackouts are a symptom of alcoholism and may last moments or days…

“One moment I was sipping a chilled drink, waiting for the bus to arrive that would take us to the game; the next thing I knew I ‘came to’ riding in the back of a school bus on the way home after the game and talking with a strange boy…He was assuring me that virginity was a renewable option…

“To me, writing and drinking went together…” (3, pp. 15-17).

She found that “speed [amphetamine] allowed you to drink without blacking out. The combination of wine and speed was a good writing elixir…

“Like many writers, I confused my drinking identity and my writing identity” (3, p. 28).

“I knew very little about cocaine except that it was glamorous and illegal, appealing to my bad-girl side. This was 1976…For me it was immediately attractive because, as a stimulant, it would allow me to drink without blacking out” (3, p. 52).

Conduit for Higher Power

Eventually she hits bottom, admits that she’s an alcoholic, and listens to sober alcoholics, who advise her to stop drinking and accept help from a higher power.

“I could believe in a benevolent creative energy, I decided. That energy would be my higher power” (3, p. 84). God, benevolent creative energy, would be her higher power. But she was a writer. How would she be able to write without drinking?

“Stop trying to be a great writer” they advised me next. “That’s your ego. Get your ego out of your writing…You are just the vehicle, the channel. Let God write through you.

“Imagine my surprise when my writing began to respond to this new…agenda. Now that I was no longer judging and condemning my sentences, my prose seemed to relax a little and to straighten out. If God were indeed writing through me, God had an easier and more accessible prose style than I did…I even liked it myself…

“…dialogue came to me readily. My characters fairly seemed to chatter. I wasn’t so much writing as I was eavesdropping. I wasn’t so much thinking something up as taking something down…I found myself losing my sense of myself as an ‘author’ and gaining a sense of myself as a conduit. I found I wrote best when I felt empty of ego, curious, and receptive rather than full of ideas” (3, pp. 85-87).

Toxic vs. Dissociative (Multiple Personality) Blackouts

Alcoholic blackouts—memory gaps for the period of time that the person was drinking—are usually thought of as the toxic effect of alcohol on the memory circuits of the brain. In older studies of blackouts, it seemed that they only occurred in chronic alcoholics after many years of drinking. But more recent studies have found that alcoholic blackouts are surprisingly common in college students.

Are these early-onset blackouts caused by the toxicity of alcohol? What else could they be caused by? Another possibility is that the alcohol is sedating and putting to sleep the young person’s host personality, allowing a drinking alternate personality to take over (incognito), so that when the person switches back to their host personality, they have a memory gap for the time of the drinking.

Now suppose that the young person took a stimulant while they were drinking. The alcohol would keep the drinking alternate personality in control, but the stimulant might keep the host personality awake, as a co-conscious bystander. (Alternate personalities are often conscious simultaneously.) So when the drinking stopped and the host personality took back control, she would not have a memory gap, and there would have been no “alcoholic blackout.”

This multiple personality scenario is supported by the description of her multiple personality type of writing process after she became sober (see above).

1. Julia Cameron. The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. 25th Anniversary Edition. New York, TarcherPerigee/Penguin Random House, 2016.

2. Julia Cameron interview (2006). https://bookpage.com/interviews/8351-julia-cameron-arts-culture#.XHAKpZNKg4V

3. Julia Cameron. Floor Sample: a creative memoir. New York, Tarcher/Penguin, 2006.