Trying to moderate ultimately didn’t work for me taking off the table altogether was the simplest solution.Īs someone who is publicly sober, I wanted to get your take on some things happening in the culture. That gray area made it confusing for me-and it’s what kept me trying to find a way to make my drinking work for a long time. But there were also nights where I would have a few glasses of wine with friends and it looked normal on the outside. More often than not, I was blacking out and would be missing huge chunks of my memory when I would wake up the next day, which was scary. I just didn't know what my drinking was going to look like on any given night. The unpredictability you mention is what ultimately brought me closer to the decision to get sober. I didn't have any examples of people I knew or even any young women who drank like I did and had elected to stop. The image we see in movies is of someone who wakes up in the morning and starts drinking from a handle of vodka on their nightstand, and that's easier for us to understand as a problem. I thought it meant drinking daily and having severe consequences to my drinking, like losing my job or my home. It's easier to recognize a problem if symptoms are more black and white.įor years I held my drinking against a black-and-white definition of what having a problem with alcohol looked like. You talk about the unpredictability of your drinking, writing that sometimes you felt “perfectly normal” after four glasses of wine, but other times you would find yourself “in tears after half a martini.” It made me think of those who, like myself, fall somewhere in the middle of alcohol use disorder’s severity spectrum and how that can make things confusing. I was really looking for a depiction of sobriety and those “firsts” without alcohol, and that's really what I set out to write with Drinking Games. I was 25 when I first started contemplating sobriety, 28 when I eventually got sober, and my big fears were dating without alcohol, advancing in my career, maintaining friendships-just so much of my life in New York had been infused with alcohol. What I couldn't find at the time-it exists now on different forms of social media-was a depiction of sobriety from a young, female voice. I read Caroline Knapp, I read Sarah Hepola, I read a lot of books about drinking and blackouts and specifically the relationship between women and alcohol. What did you want to say with Drinking Games ? What did you want to put forth that you felt perhaps hadn't been? There's a history of writers and specifically female writers chronicling their addictions and drinking behaviors: Caroline Knapp, Mary Karr, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Carrie Fisher, Leslie Jamison.

Drinking games by sarah levy