And I felt crushed that he had seen me in that way. I really respected my boss at the time, and I really wanted him to like me. It was just that when I woke up in that room, I couldn’t believe it happened. I had mornings where I woke up in the hospital. Then one day, you woke up next to your boss’s best friend with no memory of how you got there. You only drank socially and held down a job. I went back and forth between those two – from “I feel lighter” and “I’m having fun” to “I need this because I want to feel that way and I’m not.” Eventually, it just became harder and harder to control. I remember hearing from someone when I first got sober that their drinking started out as magic and then became medicine. How quickly did drinking morph into a coping mechanism? You took your first shot of vodka and later got drunk. After struggling on the SAT, you went to your first house party, where you write that an old boyfriend demoralized you in front of his friends. Growing up in the New Jersey suburbs, you felt academic pressure. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Levy, who moved to Los Angeles in early 2020, will talk about her book and road to recovery at 7 p.m., January 18, at Skylight Books. When the consequences became so negative and potentially dangerous, she finally re-evaluated her life and motives for drinking. While Levy frequently blacked out, she was able to function the next day, so in her mind, she didn’t have a problem. She drank to get drunk because that dulled her social anxiety.

Just ask Levy, 33, who did plenty of partying to be liked and appear confident and happy. “Effortless perfection” – a term coined on the Duke University campus in 2013 – is a front that can have detrimental effects, especially on the mental health of young women. We were taught to make it look easy to succeed without bragging.” “Yes, we were at the top of our classes and industries,” writes Levy in her new memoir, “Drinking Games.” “But we wouldn’t be caught dead showing how much we cared, how exhausted we were, how hard we tried. After graduating from Brown University, Sarah Levy moved to New York City in 2012 and began socializing with high-achieving millennials like herself – accomplished, fit, smart, popular people who curated seemingly perfect lives on social media.

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