Sarah T. - Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic 1975

Sarah Travis is a 15-year-old girl who feels isolated and inadequate, navigating a world that seems to move without her. Her parents are divorced, she has minimal contact with her unemployed, alcoholic father, Jerry Travis, and she lives with her mother, Jean Hodges, and her stepfather, Matt, who don’t notice the depths of her loneliness. She often feels overshadowed by her sister, Nancy, and she quietly longs for the kind of stability that seems out of reach. The home she longs for feels distant, noisy with adults’ concerns, and somehow unable to hear her ache.

At a party held by her mother, Sarah takes her first steps toward drinking, drawn by a need to ease the awkward questions and the sting of attention she doesn’t want. What begins as a momentary escape soon feels like a strange source of happiness, and she discovers a surprising moment of singing that earns praise from the partygoers. When the alcohol makes her feel lighter, she misreads the reactions around her and her parents blame a teenage friend, Ken Newkirk, for the consequences of her actions. This misattribution underscores how Jean’s focus tilts toward appearances and propriety, often at the expense of seeing Sarah’s real pain. Ken becomes a kind of bridge to social acceptance at school, but the underlying chaos at home continues to gnaw at her.

In the days that follow, Sarah’s life grows more tangled. Ken invites her to ride his horse Daisy, and the thrill of riding begins to boost her popularity at school, even as the homefront stays unstable and confusing. Jean’s judgmental stance deepens the fissure between what Sarah wants and what her family expects from her. When the household fires Margaret, the housekeeper, for raiding the liquor cabinet, the blame lands on Sarah, though it is soon clear that she has been watering down the scotch herself. The confusion at home spills into her schooling: she starts drinking at school, forges notes from her mother, and becomes increasingly unreliable. A school counselor notes that Sarah is a bright student who once approached her work with diligence, a contrast to the current spiral; this intervention earns Jean’s resentment, who feels targeted by adult authorities in the aftermath of the divorce.

As the pattern deepens, Sarah confesses to Ken that she drinks to make the days easier, and a desperate attempt to reach her father ends in a blackout while she babysits. In a raw moment of honesty, she admits to having been drinking almost daily for two years. A visit from Dr. Marvin Kittredge tries to persuade Jean that something is seriously wrong, but the concerns fail to move her away from her worries about appearances and control. Sarah then attends an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, where she meets Bobby, a younger boy whose story resonates with her and helps her recognize patterns of lying and denial she has long avoided seeing. The humility of listening to someone so much younger helps her begin to see parallels in her own behavior.

Family therapy becomes a tense but necessary forum in which Sarah expresses a deep wish for her family to be whole again and for her parents to stop fighting. When Jerry reveals that he cannot gain full custody of Sarah given the nature of his job, the ache returns with a surge of longing and a renewed urge to drink. In a fraught moment, she asks a group of rough-looking teenagers to buy vodka for her and invites them to do whatever they want with her, a reckless bid for connection that threatens everything she loves. They tease her, drink most of the bottle themselves, and she ends up taking Daisy for a ride again. Despite Ken’s efforts to intervene, Sarah drives the horse into traffic on a busy street, and the animal is mortally wounded in a collision. The police euthanize Daisy, a stark symbol of the consequences of her escalating crisis.

Recovering in the hospital, Sarah is filled with remorse and a clearer sense of what she has risked. She recognizes the importance of the relationships she cares about—family and friends she found at the AA meeting—and she admits aloud that she is an alcoholic, realizing that life as she once imagined it cannot simply resume where it left off. The path ahead remains uncertain, but her newfound honesty marks a turning point as she begins to confront the pain that drove her toward alcohol and searches for a way to rebuild trust and safety with the people who matter most to her.