Frequently Asked Questions

Everything you wanted to know about the author, but were afraid to ask in public

Greetings, and welcome to SarahHepola.com. If you’ve come to this site, you are probably curious about me, or obsessive love, or excessive drinking, so we welcome you. Pull up a chair, pop open a Topo Chico, and let’s get to know one another.

What is a Sarah Hepola?

A Sarah Hepola is a curious woodland creature who stands 5’2” in the wild, 5’6” in urban environments, where she insists on wearing heels. She has been known to write stories about things that happened to her.

Nothing. People have tried.

I wrote a memoir called The Only Thing There Is to Want, which comes out September 29, and Kirkus Reviews already called it “a brilliant autopsy of loves lost.” I wrote a bestselling memoir about drinking called Blackout. Dwight Garner at the New York Times called it “simply extraordinary,” and who am I to argue with Dwight Garner? That 2015 book has been translated into several languages.

I’ve worked in journalism for a million years (technically 30), and I currently hang my hat at The Dallas Morning News, where I write about big personalities and insider scenes. I was nominated for a National Magazine Award for a 2021 essay about the evolution of the Texas cowgirl (didn’t win, rats). I’ve been a movie and theater reviewer, a culture writer, a music critic, a sex blogger, a travel columnist, and a personal essays editor. You can rummage through the archives here.

Did I mention my second memoir, The Only Thing There Is to Want, comes out September 29? It took eight years to write, so take that, Jonathan Franzen. It’s about a forty-something woman who expected marriage and children but wound up with neither. Mistake? Gift? Let’s discuss. It’s about dating, love, sex, and other questionable decisions. 

You can find me rapping with my girl Nancy Rommelmann on our podcast Smoke Em if You Got Em. Paid subscribers get to listen to my Smoking Diaries, in which I chain-smoke in darkness while riffing on some topic. These can run 80 minutes, it’s insane. I dabble in freelancing from time to time, and I doodle on my blog.

Love is a confounding self-diagnosis, the world’s greatest unsolved mystery, and nobody can give you clarity on that issue if you lack it. But if I had to venture a guess, I’d say yes.

Definitely not. (Not that you’ll listen.)

Yes and no. I can’t get on the phone with you or anything, but I’ve logged my years in that lonely hole, and I’ve written several articles that might be useful to you. My five-part “Ask a Former Drunk” series begins with the question, “When do you know you have a problem?” and goes on to tackle topics like sex and alcohol, how to keep your life from being boring, and how to get started. But if you need help with a drinking problem, and I certainly did, I recommend one of the many recovery groups, sobriety podcasts, and online communities designed for that purpose. Here’s one that worked for me.

Oh yes. We talk about travel, pop culture, the pitfalls of technology, the complications of feminism, the low hum of being alone, and cats. If there is a unifying theme on this sprawling megalopolis of a website, it would be something like the need to connect or the conflict of the human heart. Also the best way to combine chocolate and peanut butter (your finger).

A mystery to me. Temperament? Raised by a therapist mom? Excess of estrogen? But if you spend any time with me, you’re gonna watch me cry. Not if, but when. New friends tend to mistake my tears for something rare and special, like I am letting them in, but the longer they know me, the more they’re like: Oh right, she’s crying again. If you are a man undone by women’s tears, we should NOT date. (Honestly, we should not date anyway. I don’t even know you.) I wrote a dating series called “Crying in Restaurants” for the defunct site Nerve, and I still love that title and hope to repurpose the series one day. I’d like to normalize public crying; there are old stories about soldiers crying on the battlefield, back when crying was a form of valiance, not weakness. That’s me. I am an Olympic athlete of crying.

Don’t quit.

I’m being serious. There are a passel of behaviors that predispose a person to this profession: Facility with language, a curiosity about humans, an urge for exhibitionism mixed with a need to hide. And I can offer you garden-variety advice: read more, use active verbs, listen and observe, be rigorous with your prose, tell the truth. But at some point, this career is for those who claim it. I heard Hanya Yanigahara say this at an event for her book A Little Life. “It’s not necessarily the most talented writers who get published. It’s the ones who finish.”

You look lovely, and I wish I’d said it earlier.