Near the end of her new memoir, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget, Sarah Hepola, newly sober, tries to imagine what the rest of her life will look like. She realizes that all her most satisfying daydreams depend upon her being someone else. So do her friendships, her romantic life, and even her career—she’s a writer and the personal essays editor of Salon, where, even in that catalog of human misery, her contributions stand out for their candor and lack of self-pity. For most of her life, she’d relied on alcohol to turn her into the person she wanted to be.
