Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood [Paperback]

Koren Zailckas (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 31, 2006

Garnering a vast amount of attention from young people and parents, and from book buyers across the country, Smashed became a media sensation and a New York Times bestseller. Eye-opening and utterly gripping, Koren Zailckas’s story is that of thousands of girls like her who are not alcoholics—yet—but who routinely use booze as a shortcut to courage and a stand-in for good judgment.

With one stiff sip of Southern Comfort at the age of fourteen, Zailckas is initiated into the world of drinking. From then on, she will drink faithfully, fanatically. In high school, her experimentation will lead to a stomach pumping. In college, her excess will give way to a pattern of self-poisoning that will grow more destructive each year. At age twenty-two, Zailckas will wake up in an unfamiliar apartment in New York City, elbow her friend who is passed out next to her, and ask, "Where are we?" Smashed is a sober look at how she got there and, after years of blackouts and smashups, what it took for her to realize she had to stop drinking. Smashed is an astonishing literary debut destined to become a classic.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This isn't just one girl's story of sneaking drinks in junior high, creeping out for night-long keg parties in high school and binge-drinking weeknights and weekends through college—it's also a valuable cautionary tale. At 24 (her present age), Zailckas gave up drinking after a decade of getting drunk, having blackouts and experiencing brushes with comas, date rape and suicide. She weaves disturbing statistics (from Harvard School of Public Heath studies and elsewhere) into her memoir: most girls will have their first drink by age 12, and will have the experience of being drunk by 14; teenage girls drink as much as their male peers, but their bodies process it badly (they get drunk faster, stay drunk longer and are more likely to die of alcohol poisoning); and date rape and booze go hand-in-hand. Zailckas had alcohol poisoning at 16 after a night of downing shots at a party with friends, but having her stomach pumped in the emergency room and enduring a month of being grounded didn't check her desire to drink. Fraternity keg parties led to drunken sexual encounters not-quite-remembered; drinking began to replace intimacy. Alcohol defined Zailckas's adolescence and college years to such an extent that, as she tells it, she lacks the tools to be an adult: she's unsure how to maintain relationships and unclear about sex without an alcohol buzz. Zailckas is unsparingly insightful and acutely aware of what drinking can and does do to girls. She explains that while kids are taught that drugs are always dangerous, alcohol is perceived as an acceptable rite of passage. Her book is deeply moving, written in poetic, nuanced prose that never obscures the dangerous truths she seeks to reveal.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Zailckas doesn't have the "genetically based reaction to alcohol that addiction counselors call 'a disease.'" But throughout her adolescence and early adulthood, she abused alcohol heavily: "I drank for the explicit purpose of getting drunk, getting brave, or medicating my moods." Her first sips of hard liquor, before she started high school, hit her with the force of a crush-- "as hopeful and as heartbreaking as kissing a boy." By the time she entered Syracuse University, she had already been hospitalized for alcohol poisoning, and her binge drinking through college, wholly supported by the Greek system, contributed to heartbreaking, empty sexual encounters and difficulty relating to anyone without "the third wheel" of alcohol. Zailckas muses about the societal factors that contribute to the astonishing rise in women's drinking. Most unnerving, though, are her honest, detailed accounts of her own profound abuse, which was accepted, encouraged, and chillingly commonplace; thousands of young women share her story. Like Caroline Knapp's Drinking: A Love Story (1996), this raw, eye-opening memoir will deepen readers' understanding of American culture and perhaps their own lives. Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books; Soft Cover edition (January 31, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0143036475
• ISBN-13: 978-0143036470
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.7 x 7.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (232 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #24,658 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #66 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Addiction & Recovery > Alcoholism

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

113 of 132 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Good writing, frightening subject February 8, 2005

By Craig VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

This is a well-written, seriously scary book that will likely have many readers cringing when they read about the problems alcohol led to for Zailckas. As someone with a young daughter, I found it to be both a cautionary tale and an engrossing memoir. For anyone who has an alcoholic or binge drinker in their family, you'll be able to relate on some level. For me, it was interesting to hear about the experience from the perspective of a young woman.

The author writes lucidly and poetically about her past, showing the effects of her lifestyle without ever trying to invoke pity for anything that happened to her in the past. It makes one wonder how common her story, or at least certain elements of it, are to many young women.

Although the material is often heavy and depressing, this one will keep your attention. A terrific and frightening account.

58 of 67 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Pathetic & a disservice to other young women with drinking problems July 6, 2006

By bettiep

Format:Hardcover

I really, really, really wanted to like this book. the first 150-200pages were an engaging drunkalogue and then it was completely repetitious ("i drink too much, i am always hung over, i hate men, i isolate, i am so paranoid, i drink too much, did i mention i hate men?") She is so obviously an alcoholic that she really does a disservice to other young women (or their parents) reading this book b/c she leads one to believe that AA is not necessary (or even an option for help)unless you meet some kind of stringent genetic definition of what an alcoholic is. i suspect the *one* counselor she consulted (online, no less) that told her she is not genetically an alcoholic is somewhere kicking himself. she also never shows us what she wrote to him, so it is likley she manipulated her questions to him to get the answer she wanted - that she is simply an "abusive" drinker. if she was as schooled about alcoholism as she is about alcohol advertising, then she would see how obvious her alcoholism is. she never even attended one AA meeting, yet at the end of the book she marvels at the idea of talking to another problem drinker to make her feel better. totally laughable! had she actually gone to that meeting (instead of walking by it), she could have been talking to other women just like her all along - and learning how to manage the anger and resentment that she is still clearly carrying with her. and it is very sad to see that she only stopped drinking when she met a man. i would hate to see what happens to her if they should break-up.

so i have to repeat - how very sad that she has cut herself off from all the wonderful people (women) she could meet by attending AA and learn how to manage her - very obvious - drinking problem. she is still blaming everyone else (i.e. the alcohol industry) for her problems. to anyone reading this book that identifies with her and is at a loss as to what they should do - she is in denial about her problem and is what is known as a "dry drunk". those alcohol ads that demean women did not make her pick up a drink and cause her feelings of inferiority and isolation and paranoia, etc etc - she is a sick woman and needs to get some help. a good place to start is with the support of other people just like you/her - maybe go to a meeting and learn how to get your life back together again. you do not need to struggle on your own like she does or meet a man to get your sanity back. i am not saying AAis the only way, only suggesting that you not discount it the way she did.

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars go orange July 20, 2005

By resident_out_of_touch

Format:Hardcover

I started reading this book because I recently concluded an increasingly rambunctious four years of partying at SU, and it sounded like it'd be interesting to read someone else's accounts of and insights into the same drunken stumbles I made countless times across campus hill. The real impact of the book set in when I realized how much it resonates with my own experiences, and how relevant it is because of that. Granted I'm a guy, was not in the greek system, have not been date-raped, and have not come anywhere near the levels of excess Zailckas describes. Even so, almost every episode she recounts runs in parallel with at least one or two of my own experiences, and judging by how commonplace the sight of un-hinged drunken students is at any college campus, I'm sure that this book could act as a near biography for a lot of people other than the author.

I read some critics who complained that this story didn't need to be written, since everyone knows that college kids drink, or since Koren Zailckas wasn't even in the running for "worst college drunkard" (I wondered if she would mention the frat boys who fought each other with billiards balls in socks my freshman/her senior year at SU, or the countless sirens every weekend as the paramedics pulled up to the latest case of alcohol poisoning). I kind of think that's what makes it so worthwhile though. Here is this universal american college experience that we all uncomfortably relate to, laid out for us to examine a bit more objectively than we could from any other perspective. We aren't meant to "feel sorry" for her, as so many reviewers appear to think. This is not some sappy, teary-eyed Reader's Digest nonsense, it is a critique of the easily accessible social binge-drinking scene, and she is using her own experiences, which she describes numerous time as not being unique, to theorize about the deeper aspects of the issue. I wasn't shocked or surprised by anything I read in "Smashed", that's not really the point. Ms Zailckas does a good job at digging deeply into every sequence of events, pulling out the painful facts of the matter that everybody knows but won't say, and thus cause one to cringe when they are explicitly put into words. It's easy to say stuff like "college is all about drinking, what else is new" but when the experience is presented this way you are forced to come to grips with it and think about it in a more introspective way.

I kept thinking of Tom Wolfe's last novel "I Am Charlotte Simmons", which was an exposé of sorts of the modern college experience. Tom Wolfe had a few fundamental flaws that undermined his entire novel however, whereas Koren Zailckas is able to nail the subject matter. Tom Wolfe failed primarily because he was attempting to write from, about, and to a generation that was removed from him by about fifty years. No matter how accurate his information was, any relevant commentary was neutralized by the fact that he, personally, had no grasp on what he was talking about, and it showed in his ham-handed attempts at emulating modern youth. Here we have unadulterated, nonfiction stories from only about four or five years ago, told firsthand. Koren Zailckas has the perspective to actually present some worthwhile insight on the subject, and through unflinching introspection and dissection of every stage of her drinking career, she is able to pull together an effective and thought-provoking narrative commentary.

The book is obviously focussed on girls and young women, and their particular susceptibility to alcohol abuse, but I think it carries plenty of relevance beyond that demographic. I've seen and been in plenty of the situations she describes, enough that I can now consider them in a different light. I'd reccommend this book for anyone in high school or college , it gives you the objective assessment of alcohol that isn't really possible to achieve on your own when you're getting bombed at keggers and bars every chance you get. An engaging read, and a thoroughly accurate account of modern college society.