Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (Hardcover)

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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.
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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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult (February 7, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670033766
• ISBN-13: 978-1419353239
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (207 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #498,145 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

109 of 124 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	Craig (Ohio) - See all my reviews

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.

59 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Revealing Look At Alcohol Abuse, March 14, 2005

By	Gregory Baird (Morristown, NJ) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

In 'Smashed', Koren Zailckas examines her history with drinking in a frank and brutally honest manner. From the day she first experimented with alcohol at age 14 to the severe binge-drinking that defined her college years, she takes you on a journey of excess and provides the reasons for her escalating problem. The situations she gets into are dark (waking up naked in a man's bed with the suspicion that she had been the victim of date-rape, having her stomach pumped after passing out on a dock at age 16, etc.), making for a compelling read that is at once hard to put down and difficult to hear. Looking back, Zailckas can see the reasons for her drinking and does a decent job getting across some explanations that are hard to explain to anyone who hasn't felt the same way. The most interesting revelation in the book is that Zailckas is not actually an alcoholic, but a victim of alcohol abuse. When she reaches out to a counselor on the internet she discovers that she has none of the genetic characteristics that describe alcoholism. Zailckas' problem is that excess was encouraged to her in a society that more and more sees teen drinking as a rite of passage instead of the problem it is. Her depression and insecurity made her an easy target to lose control, and no one was able to see her problem for what it was. 'Smashed' exposes a new social problem that has not been acknowledged in the media so far, and Zailckas is to be commended for bringing it out for discussion.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars go orange, July 20, 2005

By	resident_out_of_touch (Schenectady, New York United States) - See all my reviews

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.

Lots of reviews comment on the quality of the writing in Smashed. Writing-wise, this book is certainly not perfect, but come on, the author is twenty-four. If she were any older, the book would be that much less relevant. Pretty freaking good for a twenty-four year old, I say. From Tom Wolfe, veteran of journalism and cultural commentary, I expected much more than the clumsy butchering of pop culture that was "I Am Charlotte Simmons". Koren Zailckas' writing is fluid and interesting, she has a kind of poetic, rhythmic sense that makes the whole thing very easy to read. She is heavy-handed with the metaphors, but the tone of the prose rescues it from what could've been an overly cold, depressing, and didactic indictment of alcohol.

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.