Sarah Hepola, Remembering the Things I Forgot

American journalist Sarah Hepola’s extraordinary book describes her years of drinking, in a memoir of forgetting.

Her problem was blackouts, when the bloodstream is so saturated in alcohol that the hippocampus shuts down and stops storing long-term memories. Hepola would get into all sorts of sticky situations – sometimes dangerous, often sexual – when thus “unplugged”.

Writing with warmth and wit, she explores reasons for her alcoholism, from her parents’ arguments (“their fights curled like smoke beneath their bedroom door”) to cultural trends.

But the true source is a mystery in a book that is intimately personal but also offers a useful commentary on society’s obsession with booze. Western culture is so soaked in alcohol (“‘Let’s get a drink’, we say, when what we mean is ‘let’s spend time together’”) that it forgets itself. It takes someone like Hepola – who’s woken up, sore-headed, from the binge – to draw attention to the problem.