Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

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

Like the best sermon, the best memoir comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable.

But I wanted my own stories, and I understood drinking to be the gasoline of all adventure. The best evenings were the ones you might regret.

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

I’d spent four years in a back bend trying to fit in at an upscale high school. Now I was going to have to contort myself all over again.

Drinking had saved me. When I was a child trapped in loneliness, it gave me escape. When I was a teenager crippled by self-consciousness, it gave me power. When I was a young woman unsure of her worth, it gave me courage. When I was lost, it gave me the path: that way, toward the next drink and everywhere it leads you. When I triumphed, it celebrat

As much as my father was there during my childhood, he was also not there.

“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.”

Parents often try to correct the mistakes of their own past, but they end up introducing new errors.