Once-celebrated writers were being publicly rebranded as ghoulish, pieces of trash, red-pilled. You cant predict these things; its all guesswork. Because I wanted to talk to other writers about the things you cant write about anymore., His eyes narrowed. Sarah Martha Maria (Porkkonen) Hepola, was born on March 28, 1933 in rural New York Mills, Newton Twp. The reviews were mixed, but the hits didnt really come, maybe because by the time his book came out, during the cresting wave of Black Lives Matter, the culture had moved away from #MeToo discussions, or maybe because nobody felt like tangling with Malcolm Gladwell. We will miss her deeply. Joan Didion, Carl Sagan, Christopher Hitchens, though I had more reservations about that last one. Her writing has been published by the New York Times magazine, The New Republic, Elle, Glamour, The Guardian, Slate, and The Morning News, where she is a contributing writer. What things cant you write about?, Gender, sex, politics. During the resistance movement of 2016, a friends book about feminism got dropped in part because her feminism wasnt the right kind for the Trump era. The fast-typing egalitarians of the internet age wanted social change, vengeance, a megaphone for their righteous anger. The #MeToo movement, which felt like a necessary corrective when it began, was starting to feel like an arrow pointed at our own agency. Books were a common pleasure point, and I was eager to tell him about a literary party Id recently attended in New York City, where Id once lived and often visited in the Before Times. I understood such moral panics to be the product of generational hand-wringing and the religious right, which was then gaining ground. She lives in Dallas. I list some blood-alcohol content numbers in the book, which are average BACs: a fragmentary [partial] blackout happens at 0.20, and en bloc [complete] blackouts are, on average, at about 0.30. When I quit drinking in 2010, bringing to an end a dark history of blackouts and tumbles down staircases, I thought I might lose my writing career. Lets talk about it out there, he said, gesturing to the corridor that led to a packed audience, and I gave him that look, the same look Id given the younger man who asked why I didnt write about these things. She was preceded in death by: her husband, Don; her son, Mark; and her daughter in law Twyla (Paul). Its projection. Sarah Hepola The Things I'm Afraid to Write About by David Labaree March 24, 2022 Leave a Comment This post is a remarkable essay by Sarah Hepola, which appeared recently online at Atlantic. We wanted the premium Scotch and the bragging rights of being an outsider. Sarah Hepola is the personal essays editor at Salon.com. I had to learn a tolerance to sit in my own uncomfortable feelings -- and then you kind of start thinking, What kind of life do I want to build for myself?. As jobs in the industry diminished, journalism had become even more cutthroat. He gave me his dog-eared paperback of Slouching Toward Bethlehem. I was so hungry for this luxurious taffy pull, where we all gathered together and tried to sort out something closer to the truth. My book opens with an episode in Paris where I came out of a blackout in the middle of having sex with a man I did not recognize. ANew York Timescolumnist who would eventually be publicly excommunicated. Over the years, pop culture has brought us some bizarre international pairings: Jerry . Hepola, a personal essays editor at Salon who experienced blackouts during her 25 years of drinking, assumed everyone knew what they were. What gets lost when a writer mutes herself? "This is a point worth underscoring, since the most common misperception about blacking out is confusing it with passing out, losing consciousness after too much booze. The Rise to Fame The modern Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders launch in 1972 and rocket to national fame. Early in our correspondence, hed expressed great affection for Jonathan Franzen. A memoir of unblinking honesty and poignant, laugh-out-loud humor, BLACKOUT is the story of a woman stumbling into a new kind of adventure--the sober life she never wanted. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, the Atlantic, Salon, and Elle. Ask the Puritans. Often called the Stanford rape (although the ghastly episode was, under California law at the time, considered a sexual assault butnot a rape) it became famous after the young woman at the center wrote ablisteringvictims statementthat was published onBuzzFeedand went supernova. Yes. The question is: What size is that, and should it be? (Blackouts can be either partial or complete.). But the conversation didnt go as Id planned. Her place was filled with hardback books and writers who had been invited because they danced on the precarious edge of what was considered appropriate. Every once in a while, Id get a head of steam about some scandal, and Id start a big-swing essay only to bench myself a few days later. Sarah Hepola @sarahhepola Feb 22, 2023 @TheJenosphere That sounds incredible. Its kind of mind-boggling to contemplatethatnotpouring a beer on a strangers head would be the bad career move. That might be why Ive so desperately sought the validation of people on Twitter Ive never even met. Like me, the younger man had fallen in love with art because it was the place where people told the truth. Perhaps you've seen her work on Salon. Id say it was disappointed. A bigot? Peak Atlantic. Her place was filled with hardback books and writers who had been invited because they danced on the precarious edge of what was considered appropriate. One of the great mistakes of our moment is being deemed on the wrong side of history. But has anyone read ahead in the book so they know how future generations will see this stuff? My book opens with an episode in Paris where I came out of a blackout in the middle of having sex with a man I did not recognize. What was trauma, really? Me too. No jail time. Required fields are marked *. Louis C.K. "Sobriety sucked the biggest donkey dong in the world," she tells us, and she backs that up. If youve never experienced a blackout, it might be hard to understand the icy wrongness of waking up to find a blank space where three hours should be. Blackouts can be either partial or complete. First scientifically described in 1946 by E.M. Jelliinek, an alcohol-induced blackout is an amnestic event during a drinking episode without loss of consciousness. What things cant you write about?, Gender, sex, politics. The couple next to me on my flight was headed to a wedding and staying with 81 people at an AirBNB. Im worried about you. One of the great mistakes of our moment is being deemed on the wrong side of history. But has anyone read ahead in the book so they know how future generations will see this stuff? Joan Didion, Carl Sagan, Christopher Hitchens, though I had more reservations about that last one. 30 Articles Style & Design |. Privacy | One of the reasons that I drank so much when I was drinking and involved with men is that I felt deeply uncomfortable with my own body. At last, I've finally reached the end of The Atlantic. To do so risks public shaming and possible loss of livelihood, both of which are of overwhelming importance to people like Hepola who write for a living. All Content 2023 Sarah Hepola. But I think that when youre in that place, you do feel dramatic. But central to Millers despair is this: She could not remember what happened. Speaking Topics But so many of these spectacles could be grouped under a more mundane heading. She was one of those people who rarely had a bad day. From reading your book, that seemed to me like perhaps the time that was the hardest for you. How long does it take to become a therapist? I would thump the kitchen table. I told these stories and everyone laughed and I felt heroic. I remember turning to the picture of Joan on the back, young and pretty and serious. I understood such moral panics to be the product of generational hand-wringing and the religious right, which was then gaining ground. In the two years since, I have tried to drum up the courage to be someone different from the writer I had become. Consent, complicity, moral trespass, power dynamics. What It's Like When Alcohol Takes Over Your Life -- And Steals Your Memories, "periods of memory loss for events that transpired while a person was drinking,". I was not writing much about this stuff, except in the journals where I always stowed my secrets. Im watching you and you dont look OK to me. Movies and books became a refuge, along with the Top 40 radio I listened to at night in my pink-and-red bedroom to drown out arguments between my parents, who were going through a rough patch. Well, has the Internet read The Corrections?. Staying silent as writers in this fractured world is understandable, maybe even wise; its also a disserviceto society, the career we fought so hard to claim, and ourselves. When Don retired, they split their time between summers at the cabin on Duck Lake, MN and winters at their home in Mesa, AZ. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times magazine, the Atlantic, Elle, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Guardian, Salon, and Texas Monthly. Oh God, I did that. A writers life is financially precarious. Id get killed!, His look wasnt judgmental. What Sarah Hepola taught me about blackout drinking and sobriety's thrill A single womans life, also precarious. and Al Franken became Andrew Cuomo and Dave Chappelle. by Sarah Hepola. Some of them just never spoke about it and silently worried. Millers account was one of the most affecting pieces of writing I read that year. I carved out a journalism career during an era when that was not so hard to do. I was galled by the PMRC, a group of concerned mothers led by the then-wife of Al Gore, Tipper Gore, fighting the cultural rot of songs about masturbation, virginity, BDSM, all the topics a curious girl might find irresistible. But I thought thats what writers do.. When men are in a blackout, they do things to the world, he told me. I stayed on apodcast about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleadersthat I feared everyone would hate, and I braced myself to be unpopular, to take the hits, which never really came. A New York Times columnist who would eventually be publicly excommunicated. Sarah Hepola is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, "Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget."MORE FROM Sarah Hepola My parents were Yankee liberals, only one of many ways we didnt fit. And so I watched from afar as the person whose memory had not recorded the incident came to control the narrative. Cloud Teachers College and became a 4th Grade Teacher in Sebeka, MN where she met her future husband, Donald Hepola. But if this is someone really close to you, and who you care about, then I think you might want to say -- not something like youre drinking too much, because accusatory lines like that just bring up somebodys porcupine needles -- but, Im worried about you. It was also, as Miller acknowledged and like every story ever told, incomplete. Is this you? Id choose a lot of gnarly punishments before Id choose to lose the status and career Ive built over more than two decades. We see Hepola scan an AA room for a potential boyfriend, gain fifty pounds by . She is also survived by her grandchildren: Sarah, Brady, Matt, JJ, Jennifer, Greg, Joe, Danny, and Shane, along with her great grandchildren Runa, Hans, Asher, Bear, and Autumn. ), Backstage at the Texas Book Festival event, I chatted with Gladwell. I think Im gonna find out the answer to that question over the next few months. But in my professional life, I wrote about apolitical subjects such as dating and travel, and on Instagram, I mostly posted about my cat and whatever seltzer I was currently enjoying. She was preceded in death by: her husband, Don; her son, Mark; and her daughter in law Twyla (Paul). But admitting what I really thought, what I really believed about these complicated issues, I feared a similar exile. And I knew blackouts so intimately that I literally wrote the book. And its hard to be close to you right now.. Atlantic. Follow her on Twitter @sarahhepola, on Instagram @thesarahhepolaexperience, and on Facebook @facebook.com/sarah.hepola.blackout. I was stuck. Sally was very special and made friends wherever she went. If you do, that is sexual assault. A bigot? Id spent the past five or so years watching celebrities, pundits, friends, and internet randos fall from grace for reasons as varied as sharing dumb jokes, making clumsy writing errors, accidentally showing their dong, and expressing controversial (though often widely held) opinions in the public execution chambers of social media. We are all unreliable narrators. Millers account is searing. Sarah Hepola of Menahga, Minnesota September 1, 1928 - April 24, 2022 Sally was born on September 1, 1928, to Frank and Noella Hall in Little Falls, MN. The #MeToo movement, which felt like a necessary corrective when it began, was starting to feel like an arrow pointed at our own agency. I have that line in the book: Activism may defy nuance, but sex demands it." But I was swiftly counseled away by my lets-not-die-in-this-ditch partner in difficult conversations. Perhaps I had internalized my own misogyny, whatever that means. He could take the hits. She went to St. Terms of Use | Online condolences may be left at jonespearson.com. Sarah is survived by her husband, Russell Hepola; children, Paula (John) Hepola Anderson, Annette (John) Blume, Lynn (Delbert) Fickes & Keith Hepola; grandchildren, Joanna Anderson, Bryan (Mackenzie) Blume, Joshua (Kelsie) Blume, Maria (Cory) Grunewald, Hannah (Mikael) VahnDijk, Christopher Fickes, Angelene (John) Winges & Shane (Kristi) Fickes; Right. In the end, I did what I have done for the past 25 years whenever I hit some crisis in my career. She writes of waking up in a hospital with no idea how she got there and only a handful of cluesa grim scenario that is nonetheless a familiar one for blackout drinkers like me. Instead my writing grew better, stronger, more clearheaded. Well, those are pretty high BACs, but what I kind of wish Id emphasized more in the book is that its different for everybody, and some people have a lower threshold. If so, can they please tell me, so I can choose my stance accordingly? Prickly issues that deserve a full airing are being treated as settled law. And when my friends stopped laughing because, you know, laughter is a complicity; its Im in this with you. When my friends stopped laughing, I was like, Oh wow, OK, this isnt so cool anymore., Each of my friends reacted differently to what was going on. We wanted the premium Scotch and the bragging rights of being an outsider. Maybe thats why I held so fast to the younger man Id met on Tinder, of all places. Sally was born on September 1, 1928, to Frank and Noella Hall in Little Falls, MN. I surrounded myself with people who reminded me I was loved, no matter what the firing squads on Twitter said. This interview has been edited and condensed. Instead of just not inviting me, which she could have done -- she could have just slowly slinked out of my life, and I would have probably just stayed in denial and thought, You know what? Find the obituary of Sarah Hepola (1928 - 2022) from Mesa, AZ. If only I could write this well. As she tells it, Sarah Hepola's romance with alcohol began in her childhood (yes, childhood), when she would sneak sips of beer from her mother's half-drunk can in the fridge. What was I, a rape apologist? I have spoken to women who, when they wake up and they cant remember what happened the night before, their immediate thing is, I was drugged; I was roofied. And that is possible, but I think one of the things that wasnt out there, to my thinking, was just how often excessive drinking leads to blacking out, especially for women. In the pandemic madness of 2021, a journalist friend who enjoyed sounding off on science and homeopathy decided to stay the hell away from COVID. Some kind of moral monster? Writers gathered around the long communal table of Twitter, and some days it felt like the last scene of Reservoir Dogseveryone turning their guns on one another. H. Armstrong Roberts / ClassicStock / Getty; Gabriela The Things I'm Afraid to Write About A couple of years ago, I was asked to conduct an interview at the Texas Book Festival with Malcolm Gladwell. BLACKOUT: Remembering The Things I Drank To Forget, Things Fall Apart: Thoughts on Joan Didion, Why Im Doing a Podcast on the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. Its been a very interesting time, because weve had a conversation about consent that I have never seen before in my lifetime. I kept going. Were living in a time when social media have made it dangerous to address certain fraught topics from the wrong perspective. I just decided, I get to be however I want, and you need to accept me. Artists were the weirdos and the scoundrels, the square pegs who never fit the round hole of society, and the result was typically a bucket of addictions, perversions, and bizarre predilections born of life on the outskirts. Ours was not a moment to explore The Other Side. A journalist whose delightfully combative Twitter account I read regularly, like an episodic novel. She went to St. Is there anything that would have been helpful for you to hear, or that you would say to people who are in that stage right now? Not to engage in callouts, or scolding, or eye rolls, which are not my style, but to express my own deep ambivalence, my own point of view on subjects that matter to me. "Alcohol felt like freedom to me," Hepola notes. Burial service for victims of the SS Atlantic shipwreck, April 1873. Shining a light into her blackouts, she discovers the person she buried, as well as the confidence, intimacy, and creativity she once believed came only from a bottle. First, its a simply stunning piece of writing, which provokes in me feelings of both awe and jealousy. Sometimes, when money was tight, I ate this big jar of peanut butter . Im dying to talk about the Brock Turner incident, I said. Maybe Ill meet the love of my life, and maybe come April, Ill be picking up groceries for the good people of North Texas who need those seven items, pronto. The unwritten rule of elite media tribes seemed to be this: You spout the company line, or you shut up. They were just telling me about their life, and I was like, Oh man, me too. You can call it justice. Every day, I scrolled the endless river of outrage and all-caps, watching people express similar views to mine only to be pounced upon. Let's start with the most recent piece: Texas writer Sarah Hepola's Atlantic article, a rambling, illogical screed that was full of fallacious arguments. The things you and I discuss., Nicole Chung: How to organize your writing ideas, He ran a hand through his hair. The reasons were simple, at least for me. But it was like that for me.". Phone dates with writer friends in other parts of the country stretched to two and three hours as we worked out essays we would never write, toggling between outrage, despair, and armchair cultural analysis of the latest dustup. Instead my writing grew better, stronger, more clearheaded. They were married in Little Falls and moved to Eden Prairie,. I carved out a journalism career during an era when that was not so hard to do. Id think those would be the most interesting things to write about., I gave him an exasperated look. I grew up in a conservative part of Dallas, in the conservative 80s. Conan O'Brien's recent comedy bits about Finland earned him that country's adulation; his trip there for a one-hour specialairing tonightsealed the deal. Were missing the chance to learn. Ask the Puritans. Bestselling author Sarah Hepola hosts this journey through the wild and glamorous saga of a sideline spectacle that changed sports, fashion, entertainment, and countless childhoods of boys and girls like her. But I thought thats what writers do.. I was so proud of this small, private act of civil disobedience that I brought it home to Texas to show it to the younger man like a prized pelt. Oprah had him on to talk about the book, and exactly two weeks later, she sat down with Chanel Miller, whose own memoir, Know My Name, had become a sensation. When I came out the other side of that, and I was sober and I was examining, Why did I drink so much?, one of the reasons was because I never felt comfortable in my body. The next day, your brain will have no imprint of [your] activities, almost as if they didn't happen." . Not only has she written for us, but she's been filling up the internet for a while. 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