Selma Blair Opens Up About Battling Alcoholism, Many Hardships

Selma Blair recently revealed that she started drinking at age seven and battled alcoholism before decades before getting sober in 2016.

And that only begins to tell her story.

Blair talked with Vanity Fair about her forthcoming memoir, Mean Baby, and shared some shocking, deeply-personal revelations about the traumatic events she’s experienced as a result.

Two suicide attempts. Multiple sexual assaults.

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.”

Initially, 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.”

By the time she reached her teens and early 20s, her addiction had worsened.. Blair disclosed one particularly instance when she was raped after a day of binge drinking during a college spring break trip.

“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.”

Aside from telling a therapist, she’s never previously spoken about her sexual assaults.

“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.”

Blair says she hopes that her memoir will help those who are similarly struggling.

“I wrote the book for my son…and for people trying to find the deepest hole to crawl into until the pain passes. I’m in a good place. I cannot believe all this happened in my life, and I’m still here and I’m okay.”