Smashed: Story of a Drunken
Girlhood by Koren Zailckas
Awesome
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.
Personal Review: Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood by
Koren Zailckas
My uncle had a slogan painted on his cellar wall -- "Those who drown their
sorrows with rink often only irrigate them." This might have been the
slogan of "Smashed" Koren Zailckas's harrowing tale of her own youthful
alcohol abuse. Koren's tales stretch from her first drink as a 14-year-old at
a friend's house to her eventual abandonment of drinking in her early 20s.
In between are a litany of blackouts, uncontrolled drinking, empty
relationships, emergency room visits and waking up caked in vomit or
severely hung over in strange rooms. Koren's telling is almost novelistic --
a detailed retelling of a drink's colors, her own physiological reactions and
her twisted perceptions of friends. Her close calls with date rape and
alcohol poisoning are frightening, and after a while repetitive, empty and
depressing. Koren is best at examining the way that parents, friends,
schools and the sorority system feed alcohol abuse in the young. Parents
see drinking as a "life stage behavior" that is not terribly worrying and give
presents of liquor to their out-of-control kids. Sororities organize dances
and outings that are cover for binge drinking. Business takes place in an
atmosphere oiled by alcohol. As Koren describes it, her world is one in
which drinking alcohol is the norm, from which abstinence is the aberrant
behavior that needs to be explained.
The book only lagged in the last chapters, as Koren moved away from the
world of constant drinking. These chapters are full of the blackout holes
that would have expected in her earlier, boozier days. I would have liked to
know more about the thought process that underlay giving up liquor. Still,
the emptiness and futility of her life under the sway of the bottle was well
worth the price of the book. A must-read for parents of teens and
especially of college kids who need to know what their children might be
experiencing in hose all-important "life phases."
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