Elspeth Muir’s brother Alexander jumped into Brisbane river weeks after turning 21. When they pulled his body out of the water three days later, his blood-alcohol content measured almost .25.
“My brother died because he was drunk,” Muir wrote in her memoir Wasted: A Story of Alcohol, Grief and a Death in Brisbane, “and because the drink made him stupid”.
The book – a mix of personal stories and journalism – examines Australia’s troubled relationship with alcohol. It’s also a stunning evocation of grief that spans 21 neat chapters, encompassing the writer’s own drinking in her teens and 20s. If the memoir doesn’t solve its own howling moan of “Why?” it certainly answers the question “How?”
“It was extremely difficult to write,” Muir tells Guardian Australia. “It was a long and laboured process. And,” she chuckles, “I spent a lot of time crying in my room as I wrote it.”
However painful the writing process, Wasted begins with a wonderful tribute to Alexander, who had “spiky red neck hair, [a] lopsided smile, faded freckles and blue eyes”. As the book goes on to explore the dark side of our drinking culture, there is much pleasure to be found in the evocative Australian iconography peppered throughout the harrowing narrative.
Frangipani boughs from the tree outside my parents’ kitchen were wired into a messy funeral wreath. Beneath the lid was my brother’s soggy body – fresh from the refrigerator – pickled in embalming fluids, alcohol and river water.
Since the age of 13, Alexander had been binge drinking – and getting into trouble for it. Muir recalls more than one occasion when she had to evade police questions regarding the whereabouts of her teenage brother.
“He was cheeky, not harmful,” she tells me. “But exhibited extreme and danger-seeking behaviours that were exacerbated when he was drunk. They were often treated as if they were funny, and there was an element of forgiveness.”
Muir’s memoir touches on confession, as she explores her own culpability in encouraging and excusing the drinking culture that led to Alexander’s death.
“I don’t know why it was so important that there was alcohol, always,” she writes. “Without it, I would rub up against the elements of the world, and chafe and blister.”
Muir expands on that idea over the phone. “I’m shy,” she tells me. “And it was really helpful for me in social situations. Nobody ever thought about it, it was just always there.”
One of the most revealing scenes of the book is when Muir recalls her first alcohol-sodden sexual encounter.
“I lost my virginity when I was 17 in a flimsy prefab house in an inland suburb on the Gold Coast,” she writes. “Fifteen years later, Greg’s actions are clearer to me. He took me away from the party and my friend ... I was in his power. I initially said no to sex, and he knew it was my first time. Although he told me I said yes, I was sufficiently intoxicated not to remember this. I didn’t consent freely.”
In 2013, columnist Emily Yoffe published an article in Slate, “College women: stop getting drunk”. She warned young women of their own implicitness in sexual assault; getting wasted, she argued, put them in danger.
Muir, prompted by the fallacies in this article, believes this emphasis on female culpability is a key part of rape culture. “I want to talk about this because I never went to the police and said I was raped, and I never gave consent. I’m not even sure if they would have taken that seriously,” she says.
This misconception – that the intoxication of women is to blame for the actions of men – has re-emerged in public debate following the Stanford sexual assault victim’s letter to her attacker, Brock Turner.
“[Sexual consent] wasn’t a conversation we had when I was young,” Muir says, her voice growing strong. “Men and women should be talking about it all the time.”
It’s this principle – that we should talk about the dark things that happen when we drink – that propels the memoir. Alexander’s death was “a waste”, Muir writes. Out of the ruins of a young man’s life, Muir has created a fundamental challenge to Australians: let’s talk about booze.
• Wasted: A Story of Alcohol, Grief and a Death in Brisbane is out now through Text Publishing
