Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

A thing known but never discussed: Your mother needs some time to herself. I learned to tread lightly

I liked to curl up inside my own suffering and stay for a while.

Surrounded by a land of plenty, I couldn’t shake the notion that what I had been given was not enough. So I “borrowed” clothes from other people’s closets. I had an ongoing scam with the Columbia Record & Tape Club

I needed alcohol to drink away the things that plagued me. Not just my doubts about sex. My self-consciousness, my loneliness, my insecurities, my fears. I drank away all the parts that made me human, in other words, and I knew this was wrong.

Cramming food into my mouth brought a rush of rebellion, but I was never sure who I was fighting.

“I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be,” Joan Didion wrote. “Otherwise they turn up unannounced.”

What’s the difference between a person who’s unfulfilled and a person who’s impossible to please?

Stop pretending to be someone you aren’t, because otherwise you have to go into hiding whenever you can’t keep up the act.

I had broken blood vessels around my eyes from vomiting in the morning.