“Shuggie Bain” by Douglas Stuart (post 3): Agnes, Shuggie’s mother, may be having multiple-personality memory gaps, not alcoholic blackouts

I’m nearly halfway through this 430-page novel, and it is, supposedly, well established that Agnes, a chronic alcoholic, has been repeatedly having alcoholic blackouts. But I look back at the description of one of her so-called blackouts:

“Agnes lowered her chin back to her chest and tried to clear her blackout…The memories of the previous night started to ring like large chapel bells in her scull.

“Clang, here is the wean [child] dancing on the bed.

“Clang, here is the flame on the curtains.

“Clang, here is Shug [Shuggie’s father], twisting his wedding band with a face full of disappointment again.

“Agnes…thought about holding the wean down as the flames raced up the curtain. She pushed the memory away and willed herself not to look at it again, yet the more she looked away the more it blossomed like a terrible flower. The guilt sank like dampness into her bones, and she felt rotten with shame” (1, pp. 71-72).

Since she has the memory, and, therefore, did not have a blackout, why is she calling it a “blackout”? She evidently does not understand the concept of an alcoholic blackout: memories are not recorded, and so cannot later be remembered.

Perhaps she has multiple personality, and it was another personality (a personality who likes to drink) who did those things last night, at a time when her regular personality was not in control, and so her regular personality had, in a sense, been “blacked out” at that time.

But since the memories had been recorded by her brain, they existed, and could be retrieved by her regular personality by a sort of self-hypnotic recall: when she “tried to clear her blackout.”

1. Douglas Stuart. Shuggie Bain. New York, Grove Press, 2020.