Selma Blair is talking at length for the first time about her decades-long battle with alcohol addiction in her forthcoming memoir, Mean Baby, and the traumatic events she’s experienced as a result.
In her new book out next week, the actress who was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 2018 opens up about her drinking problem, which began when she got drunk for the first time at just seven years old, as well as her two suicide attempts and multiple sexual assaults. “I don’t know if I would’ve survived childhood without alcoholism,” Blair confessed in an interview with People. “That’s why it’s such a problem for a lot of people. It really is a huge comfort, a huge relief in the beginning. Maybe even the first few years for me because I did start really young with that as a comfort, as my coping mechanism.”
In an excerpt from the memoir, she writes, “The first time I got drunk it was a revelation. I always liked Passover. As I took small sips of the Manischewitz I was allowed throughout the seder a light flooded through me, filling me up with the warmth of God. But the year I was seven, when we basically had Manischewitz on tap and no one was paying attention to my consumption level, I put it together: the feeling was not God but fermentation. I thought ‘Well this is a huge disappointment, but since it turns out I can get the warmth of the Lord from a bottle, thank God there’s one right here.’ I got drunk that night. Very drunk. Eventually, I was put in my sister Katie’s bed with her. In the morning, I didn’t remember how I’d gotten there.” Early on, she explained, she wasn’t drinking to get drunk, but was just taking “quick sips whenever my anxiety would alight. I usually barely even got tipsy. I became an expert alcoholic, adept at hiding my secret.”
Her addiction worsened, however, as she entered her teens and early 20s. Blair disclosed one particularly traumatizing instance during a spring break trip in college where she was raped after a day of binge drinking. “I don’t know if both of them raped me. One of them definitely did,” she wrote. “I made myself small and quiet and waited for it to be over. I wish I could say what happened to me that night was an anomaly, but it wasn’t. I have been raped, multiple times, because I was too drunk to say the words ‘Please. Stop.’ Only that one time was violent. I came out of each event quiet and ashamed.” She added that aside from telling a therapist, she’s never previously spoken about her sexual assaults. Blair told the magazine, “Writing that stopped me dead in my tracks. My sense of trauma was bigger than I knew. I did not realize that assault was so central in my life. I had so much shame and blame. I’m grateful I felt safe enough to put it on the page. And then can work on it with a therapist and with other writing, and really relieve that burden of shame on myself.”
In an interview on Today Wednesday, the actress also said that writing about these traumatic experiences, including being violated by a teacher, helped her realize that she was a victim. “You bury it. You really do,” she said. “It’s a big deal to have these things happen and hold that shame in your cells.”
The Cruel Intentions star has now been sober since 2016 and hopes that her memoir will help those who are similarly struggling. “It’s a lot,” she said. “I wrote the book for my son…and for people trying to find the deepest hole to crawl into until the pain passes.” For now, Blair adds, “I’m in a good place. I cannot believe all this happened in my life, and I’m still here and I’m okay.”