Hungover: The Morning After and One Man's Quest for the Cure

by Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall

Overview

One intrepid reporter's quest to learn everything there is to know about hangovers, trying all of the cures he can find and explaining how (and if) they work, all so rest of us don't have to

We've all been there. One minute you're fast asleep, and in the next you're tumbling from dreams of deserts and demons, into semi-consciousness, mouth full of sand, head throbbing. You're hungover. Courageous journalist Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall has gone to the front lines of humanity's age-old fight against hangovers to settle once and for all the best way to get rid of the aftereffects of a night of indulgence (short of not drinking in the first place).

Hangovers have plagued human beings for about as long as civilization has existed (and arguably longer), so there has been plenty of time for cures to be concocted. But even in 2018, little is actually known about hangovers, and less still about how to cure them. Cutting through the rumor and the myth, Hungover explores everything from polar bear swims, to saline IV drips, to the age-old hair of the dog, to let us all know which ones actually work. And along the way, Bishop-Stall regales readers with stories from humanity's long and fraught relationship with booze, and shares the advice of everyone from Kingsley Amis to a man in a pub.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780698178939
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/20/2018
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	416
File size:	16 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall's first book was an account of the year he spent in deep cover, living with the homeless in Toronto's infamous Tent City. Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown was nominated for the 2005 Pearson Writers' Trust of Canada Non-Fiction Prize, the Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize, the Trillium Award, and the City of Toronto Book Award. The following year, he was awarded the Knowlton Nash Journalism Fellowship at Massey College and also played the role of Jason - a bad-mannered, well-dressed journalist - on CBC-TV's The Newsroom. He currently teaches writing at the University of Toronto's School of Continuing Studies. Ghosted, his debut novel, was a finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award and published in Canada, the US, and France.

Read an Excerpt

Welcome to Your Hangover

You tumble from dreams of deserts and demons into semiconsciousness. Your mouth is full of sand. A voice is calling from far away, as if back in that blurry desert. It is begging you for water. You try to move, but can’t.

And now that call is getting louder, like a pain in your head. A headache . . . But no, oh no, this is so much more—something terrible and growing. It is like your brain has started to swell, pressing against your cranium—eyes pushing out of their sockets. You cradle your head, in shaking hands, to keep your skull from splitting . . .

But in truth your brain isn’t growing at all. It is, in fact, drastically shrinking. As you slept, your body, bereft of liquid, had to siphon water from wherever it could, including that kilo of complex meat that holds your messed-up mind. So now your brain, in the awful act of shrinking, of constricting, is pulling at the membranes attached to your skull, causing all this goddamn pain, tugging at the fibers of your very being.

Alcohol is a diuretic. You drank a lot of it last night, and it stopped your body from absorbing water. And out with the H2O went all those other things—electrolytes, potassium, magnesium—that make your cells (i.e., you) actually function. So that persistent call from your dried-out brain has a point: you’d better get some water!

With Sisyphean effort, you raise your head. The room begins to spin. The bar last night was spinning, too, and not in a fun, disco-ball way. More like being trapped on a hellish carousel. When you closed your eyes, it just got worse—up and down, faster and faster on some devil’s spinning pony.

The cause of all this whirling around (apart from the booze you drank) happens to be a fish that crawled onto land 365 million years ago and became the physiological precursor to all animal life, including ours. Its fins became talons, claws and fingers. Its scales became feathers, fur and skin. And its jawbone, containing a mysterious gel that’s older than time, became your inner ear, wherein today you have microscopic hairlike cells measuring the movement of that gel, sending messages to your brain regarding sound, the tilt of your head, and acceleration. And that’s why the world is spinning. It is, essentially, a kind of landlocked seasickness.

Booze is like a pirate. It likes adventure—to go with the flow for a while, then suddenly take command, and also stir shit up a bit, especially once it reaches your inner ear. Alcohol is much lighter than the weird old gel in charge of your equilibrium. Unable to mix, to come to terms, the booze gives chase, around and around, until your brain thinks you’re spinning out of control. When this happens, your body tries to find a fixed point—a spot on the imagined horizon. Last night, when you shut your eyes, hoping for the spinning to stop, your pupils kept darting to the right—tracking a point that wasn’t there.

And now, the morning after, most of the booze has left your body; what remains is burnt out and broken down and escaping through your bloodstream. So now the chase in your inner ear is going in reverse, the world spinning in the opposite direction—your eyes twitching to the left this time. This is one of the reasons why police at roadside safety checks shine a light in your eyes. In observing the direction of your pupils, they should be able to tell if you are drunk, hungover, or hopefully neither.

Not that you care about that right now; spinning is spinning, and you’d like it to stop. Sure, you might have drunk too much, but this part is hardly your fault. It wouldn’t even be happening if that stupid old fish had contained a different gel—or just stayed in the water where it belonged. Okay, now you’re getting irritable—even a bit irrational. A lot of that has to do with exhaustion and a rebounding of stimulant. You may have passed out, but not in any restful way. Once the sedation dissipated, there was no chance of reaching those deep and deeply needed levels of sleep. As much as a hangover is dehydration, it is just as much fatigue.

So even now, with the call for water like static thunder, you drop back down, thinking maybe, just maybe, you can fall asleep and dream instead of drinking in the desert. This time, though, when you close your eyes, the spinning moves downward. And now you feel your guts.
At some point last night, the booze pushed right through the lining of your stomach, inflaming the cells and making hydrochloric acid—the same stuff used to peel paint and polish stone. So on top of the dehydration and fatigue, you’ve got a gut full of industrial cleaner. And your stomach cells aren’t the only ones on fire.

The rest of your organs are inflamed as well, swelling and tightening the tissues of your kidneys, your pancreas, your liver, and so on—impeding their ability to release toxins or absorb nutrients and water, even if you manage to get some down. To be fair, though, it’s not just the alcohol that’ll make this morning so rough. It’s what your body’s been doing to fight it.

Your liver is central command when it comes to destroying poisons in the body. To deal with your intake of alcohol, it sent out kamikaze troops called free radicals. Mission accomplished, they should have been neutralized. If, however, you kept on drinking, the free radicals just kept on mobilizing. So you might have won the battle, but now you’ve got rogue killers roaming through your body, looking for fights wherever they can . . .

In a desperate attempt to rein in the radicals, to regain control, your liver is kind of freaking out—and the result is a buildup of acetaldehyde. This is the same way that one of the meanest drugs ever created works. Antabuse was developed to treat severe alcoholism. When mixed with booze, it causes headaches and vomiting so extreme that even the most die-hard drinker becomes terrified of another sip. For decades, the only medical treatment for alcoholism was a prescription for instant, crippling hangover—a little taste of which you’ve got right now: pain and nausea until your brain stops thinking of water and begs for mercy instead.

But, of course, that is all just physical; the worst is yet to come. Attempting to go fetal, you roll onto something. It feels like a fish, but it is your soul. And your squishy soul is moaning and laughing, as though you did this to yourself. Which, of course, you did.

There is rarely a time that people knowingly make themselves so quickly ill as when they get drunk or high. That’s part of why, as the physical effects change, the metaphysical trauma will spread. Just as the quality and quantity of the spirits consumed may dictate the physical aspects of your hangover, the spirit in which you consumed the spirits will often decide the metaphysical. It’s what makes an I-won-the-Oscar/Super Bowl/lottery!–induced hangover and an I-lost-my-job/girlfriend/a-thousand-bucks-at-the-blackjack-table hangover feel so very different. The one you have now is the latter kind. And eventually the pain and nausea will be a welcome relief from the thoughts swirling around in your head like antediluvian gel, or goddamn desert demons:

You’ve squandered your potential. And another day of your life. You’ll never find another girlfriend. You probably have liver cancer. And will end up dying alone. But right friggin’ now, you just need to throw up.

Welcome to your hangover.

Table of Contents

Preface: A Few Words About a Few Words xiii

Welcome to Your Hangover 1

Part 1 What Happens In Vegas 7

First Interlude: A Drink Before the War 32

Part 2 What Happens Above Vegas 37

Second Interlude: Plenty of Aversion; A Version of Pliny 61

Part 3 The Hair That Wags The Dog 65

Third Interlude: And Up She Rises 108

Part 4 A Mad Hatter In Middle Earth 115

Fourth Interlude: Werewolves of London 140

Part 5 Twelve Pints In Twelve Pubs 145

Fifth Interlude: The Withnail Awards; A Press Release 176

Part 6 The Hungover Games 179

Sixth Interlude: A Roots of Remedy Roundup 206

Part 7 The Future's So Bright 211

Seventh Interlude: Killer Parties 235

Part 8 The Tiger On The Roof 239

Eighth Interlude: I Woke Up This Morning 256

Part 9 Beyond The Volcanoes 261

Ninth Interlude: Aspirin or Sorrow 290

Part 10 When Lizards Drink From Your Eyes 295

Tenth Interlude: The Hangover Writer 317

Part 11 After The Flood 323

For the Love of Hangovers: A Kind of Conclusion 355

Acknowledgments 371

Permissions 377

Notes on Sources 379

Bibliography 391

Editorial Reviews

…Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall is a fine person to write a book about hangovers, not only because he's a tenacious researcher but also because he's willing to get thoroughly torn up on a consistent basis in colorful circumstances…You expect a book about alcohol to ramble a little, and his commitment to the subject more than compensates. Many writers would have given up the project after urinating in a public fountain or wandering alone into a dark German forest or vomiting into a sombrero. Bishop-Stall does not.

The New York Times Book Review - Molly Young

09/24/2018
Journalist Bishop-Stall (Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown) explores the history and treatment of hangovers with humor and an amiable style, hindered by disorganization and gratuitous length. Believing the topic to be underexamined, he crisscrosses the globe to try “every tincture, tonic, powder, pill, placebo, root, leaf, bark, chemical and therapeutic process I could test, and then some others.” The reader follows him to an IV treatment at Hangover Heaven in Las Vegas, a session with Reset (a powder-liquid mix) at the Hangover Information Center in Amsterdam, and a Kräuter-Herbaud (herbal hay bath) in Almdorf Seinerzeit, Austria. Intriguing minihistories include the derivation of the phrase “hair of the dog,” the connection between drinking and sin, and theories regarding why glasses are clinked together during toasts. Bishop-Stall also inserts other material—experimenting with creating his own hangover cure, recreating a pub crawl from the comedy film The World’s End—into an already busy book. An ingratiating writer, he can be enamored with sentences that sound good, but don’t communicate much (“I became like a man scared of himself, yet undaunted by the morning”). Though perhaps well-matched to the subject, this book’s shambling and loose-limbed structure mostly detracts from its focus. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

In his irreverent, well-oiled memoir, HUNGOVER, Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall sets out on a liver-punishing world tour in search of a cure for the condition. With a heavy pour of gonzo styling, the author samples the local culture not only through the bottle but by throwing himself into activities that only a madman would voluntarily do while hung over… Between accounts of pub crawls, Oktoberfest and meetings with the heads of hangover-cure companies, Mr. Bishop-Stall packs his book with humorous and enlightening asides about alcohol in literature (there’s lots of it), athletes as accomplished at the bar as on the field (David Wells pitched a perfect game after a rager) and more.” —Brian Kelly, The Wall Street Journal

"Who knew hangovers could be so much fun? Evidently Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall, who brings us on an engrossing, hilarious, and sometimes painful tour through the history and science of the morning after."  —Bianca Bosker, New York Times bestselling author of Cork Dork

"The Canadian writer and actor Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall is a fine person to write a book about hangovers, not only because he’s a tenacious researcher but also because he’s willing to get thoroughly torn up on a consistent basis in colorful circumstances. He gorges on single-malt Scotch in Las Vegas, swallows a dozen pints of ale in a series of English pubs, binges on tequila and collapses beside a cactus near the Mexican border, wears lederhosen to a German beer festival and so forth. Reading his chronicle, Hungover: The Morning After and One Man’s Quest for the Cure has an effect not unlike recovering from food poisoning or slipping into a warm house on a frigid night. You turn the pages thinking, 'Thank God I don’t feel like that right now.' Or maybe, 'Thank God I’m not this guy." '—The New York Times Book Review

“Wow. The writing in this book was so vivid, there were actually moments reading it that I started to feel like I was having the symptoms of a hangover, even if I'd had nothing to drink the night before.” —Ari Schapiro, NPR

"Who knew subject matter so (literally) uncomfortable could be so much damn fun? Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall is the perfect endearingly flawed and funny narrator to take us on this wild, world-wide adventure into the history of our painful mornings after. Whether he's piloting a fighter plane in Vegas, chatting with a blacksmith in Devon, cheating death in the desert and the alps, or attempting 12 pints in 12 pubs, his daring, wit and insight never disappoint — all with, it would seem, a blazing hangover. Part science, part folklore, part string of the author's very bad ideas with good intentions, Hungover is a highly knowledgeable and ridiculously enjoyable ride."  —Stacey May Fowles, author of Baseball Life Advice

“Despite millennia of drinking, there is no consensus on a cure for excessive drinking. But a cure is exactly what Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall set out to find in his new book Hungover. Drawing on a decade of research, and years more of informal research, Bishop-Stall’s quest took him around the world: drink, suffer, repeat. As he points out in the book, and as anyone who has scoured the internet for a solution to their booze-fuelled hedonism can attest, there has been little scientific research into the hangover remedy.” —The Guardian

“Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall has risked life and liver to write this book, a perilous trip into many mornings after—historical, cinematic, literary and, of course, his own.” —Adam Rogers, author of Proof: The Science of Booze
 
“Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall invests health, wealth and well-being in a wild Dionysian quest for a viable hangover cure. In the end he gets more than he bargained for,
and we do, too.” —Linden MacIntyre, Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning author

“Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall serves up part travelogue and part confession here. At the outset, he pays some tribute to the hard-drinking English novelist and critic Kingsley Amis, who was no stranger to the hangover. Indeed, Hungover is a tribute to working through what Amis himself once described as the two components of the dreaded ‘morning after’: the physical side (for which there are varied remedies about which he wrote in detail). And then the metaphysical side, which, as Bishop-Stall demonstrates in eleven chapters of often disarmingly personal prose.” —Forbes.com

“Bishop-Stall explores the history and treatment of hangovers with humor and amiable style.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“It takes a writer as skilled as Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall to write a rip-roaring adventure story about the morning after. Thoroughly researched, rich in history and humour, against all odds, Hungover makes you wish you were there.”  —Tabatha Southey

“Hangovers have haunted humans since the invention of beer and will follow us like a dirty, drunk shadow until the end of our days. But there are a few hopefuls among us who say we are not doomed to that fate. In Hungover, journalist Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall tests out hangover cures like polar bear swims and saline IV drips in an effort to figure out how to make Sunday mornings a bit more sufferable. He sorts through the fact and the fiction so you don’t have to.” —Inverse.com

“Fans of Mary Roach will delight in Bishop-Stall's similar knack for collecting stories and anecdotes from a quirky cast of experts, as well as his similar proclivity for fascinating tangents… Hungover is a world tour of a party, with a raucous cast of winos and experts, figures cultural and political… Reading Hungover is akin to watching The Hangover… his sense of adventure and one-liners make for a similarly uproarious ride.” —Shelf Awareness

From the Publisher

2018-10-02

An investigation of one of the primary downsides of alcohol that has forever plagued and puzzled the world's drinkers: the common hangover.

"You tumble from dreams of deserts and demons into semi-consciousness," writes Bishop-Stall (Writing/Univ. of Toronto School of Continuing Studies; Ghosted, 2010, etc.). "Your mouth is full of sand. A voice is calling from far away, as if back in that blurry desert. It is begging you for water. You try to move, but can't." In an attempt to pinpoint an effective cure to this morning-after curse, the author plunges into his own lost weekend, emerging with an irreverent, quasi-clinical narrative thick with witty anecdotes and hilarious asides. This is not a treatise on methods of conquering a hangover, nor a step-by-step guide on how to deliver oneself from the evils of this ancient ailment. In his travels to the world's most notorious drinking spots, including Amsterdam, Scotland, New Orleans, and Las Vegas, the author engaged with all manner of experts and researchers. Along the way, he imbibed every alcoholic concoction imaginable, often while juggling multiple writing assignments. He also met dozens of interesting people, and he tells their stories as well as the backgrounds of various cocktails, the etymology of alcohol-associated words, and the ever changing cultural mores surrounding drunkenness since the Dark Ages. Between visits to various commercial detox clinics that offer IV drip treatments, Bishop-Stall experimented with the often "messy, stinky, dodgy work" of trying nearly every practical (and impractical) morning-after solution ever invented. These include modern pills and nutritional supplements, offbeat recipes like mixing charcoal powder with milk, and, of course, the classic remedy: the hair of the dog. Eventually, Bishop-Stall arrived at a cure of sorts, which he shares with readers. "Yes, I have found a cure for the common hangover—or, more accurately, an antidote, or perhaps a prophylactic," he writes. "But essentially it is a cure."

A sharp, entertaining foray into one of civilization's most ancient and agonizing quandaries.

Kirkus Reviews