Selma Blair Reveals She First Got Drunk At 7 Years Old

Selma Blair is opening up about her decades-long struggles with alcoholism in a vulnerable new memoir, revealing the very young age when she got drunk for the first time.

The Cruel Intentions star has been open about her past before, including being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 2018, but she is getting even more real in her upcoming memoir Mean Baby, out May 17. In the memoir, Blair writes about how drinking affected her life from a young age, including being sexually assaulted in college after a day of binge-drinking.

Blair, who has been sober since 2016, said her past alcohol use started as a way to deal with her life, but it was for that same reason that it became a problem.

"I don't know if I would've survived childhood without alcoholism," she told People. "That's why it's such a problem for a lot of people. It really is a huge comfort, a huge relief in the beginning. Maybe even the first few years for me because I did start really young with that as a comfort, as my coping mechanism."

She went into more detail in her memoir, revealing the "revelation" she had when she first got drunk when she was just 7 years old.

"The first time I got drunk it was a revelation," she writes. "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."

Blair also opened up for the first time, outside of therapy, about being raped "multiple times," including during a spring break trip, a traumatic incident that left her "quiet and ashamed." She said even putting it in writing "stopped me dead in my tracks."

"My sense of trauma was bigger than I knew," she said. "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."

Despite her struggles, she is hopeful for the future and hopes her memoir can help others facing similar hurdles to "find the deepest hole to crawl into until the pain passes."

"I'm in a good place," she said. "I cannot believe all this happened in my life, and I'm still here and I'm okay."