Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

Aside from the fact that Zailckas writes beautiful prose, I enjoyed Smashed because she kicks booze without A.A. The disease model of addiction has people believing drunks have some kind of motor control problem. They just can't put down that bottle, and in fact, they need god to do it for them. I believe this theory is a great disservice to all the problem drinkers out there who use alcohol as a negative coping mechanism and seriously fuck up their lives with booze, because it's possible to do all that without an addiction. Like Zailckas, for a lot of people, alcohol serves a purpose -- usually a negative coping mechanism, but a coping mechanism all the same -- for a time; then the negatives of use begin to outweigh the positives. At show more this point it may be time to stop or cut back. I think it bothers people Zailckas did this without 12 steps, but look up the statistics: A.A. isn't very effective. Unless you're at a frat party, the bottle probably isn't taped to your hand. Put it down. Or not. It actually is a choice. show less

Aside from the fact that Zailckas writes beautiful prose, I enjoyed Smashed because she kicks booze without A.A. The disease model of addiction has people believing drunks have some kind of motor control problem. They just can't put down that bottle, and in fact, they need god to do it for them. I believe this theory is a great disservice to all the problem drinkers out there who use alcohol as a negative coping mechanism and seriously fuck up their lives with booze, because it's possible to do all that without an addiction. Like Zailckas, for a lot of people, alcohol serves a purpose -- usually a negative coping mechanism, but a coping mechanism all the same -- for a time; then the negatives of use begin to outweigh the positives. At show more this point it may be time to stop or cut back. I think it bothers people Zailckas did this without 12 steps, but look up the statistics: A.A. isn't very effective. Unless you're at a frat party, the bottle probably isn't taped to your hand. Put it down. Or not. It actually is a choice. show less

Two white, privileged fourteen year-olds raid a parent’s rum cabinet before a birthday party. Several high-schoolers get wasted one night at a bonfire on hard alcohol provided by an older sibling. A dorm of freshman girls run wild through the halls, nightly, swigging wine and stealing couches from the lounge. A sorority pledge event involves massive alcohol consumption and fraternity heckling with underage students. Manhattan interns are invited to lavish corporate parities where older executives are blasted off of their toes on $39 martinis. Young corporate fledglings begin to follow in the footsteps of older office-mates who come in red-eyed and disheveled after launch parties and “business dinners”.

While all disturbing in their show more own way, these are hardly newsworthy headlines. We, as a drinking, partying culture, observe, dismiss and even celebrate alcoholic excesses as rites of passage, matters of fact and facts of life. This is Koren Zailckas’ thesis in Smashed. From parental negligence, or sometimes even encouragement, to Budweiser ’s sexualization of the drinking girl, to general pressures of society, we, especially as women, notes Zailckas, are born, literally, into a culture doused in ok’d abuses.

Her own drinking life is chronicled from pre-highschool through recent post-grad. It is an interesting take on the way many many people go through their teen years, young adulthood and even sometimes into later adult life. In short, I enjoyed many parts of it.

Now the big however.

I finished this book almost a day ago and still can’t tell you how I feel about it. On some levels, I thought it was fantastic. On some levels I wanted to throw it across the room. Did I want to throw it across the room because some of it, substance related or simply reflections on society, hit a little bit close to home? Maybe. But still, there were some reflections masquerading as truths that I found to be wholly subjective, rather than objective.

I agree, wholeheartedly, that the alcohol industry plays a role in how we view the act of drinking. Just like selling candy and junk food to kids who watch children’s programming may lead to obesity and the constantly shrinking runway model/hotel heiress may lead to disordered eating, the barrage of The Party Girl on MTV, in Vogue, on billboards, are only part of the problem.

Certainly, there are double standards. If a drunk frat boy has relations with a drunk sorority girl, he’ll be labeled a stud and she’ll be labeled easy. It was her fault she got drunk. It wasn’t his fault because he was drunk. She wanted it. Alcohol is marked to men and women differently, playing on feminine “weakness” and male “vitality”. We’re all aware of these cliches.

I don’t, though, think that any of these ideas or truths are legitimate cause or excuse for lack of responsibility. I found that a good deal of the book meandered along, waiting for a “reason to stop”, waiting for friends, sisters, magazine ads and coworkers to stop their silly games so she could stop hers.

I also found it hard to watch Koren go through several near death experiences (some of theme as harsh as stomach pumping and nonconsensual sex, others as “mild” as daily vomiting up blood) and numerous failed attempts to drink moderately, to have her repeatedly cry out that she was not an “alcoholic”; she just abused alcohol, simply because she had no known family history of alcoholism. For me, this seems like a big fat slice of denial as most of her drinking seemed uncontrollable and emotionally fueled, but, that, I suppose, in itself, was not a deal breaker for me. I am not her sponsor. I am not her therapist. I am not her mother and I am not her.

Criticism aside, I enjoyed the book. It did shed light on a large portion of culture that goes uncriticized as it simply allows “girls to be girls” or “boys to be boys”. The writing, itself, was great and I’d like to see Zailckas turn out fiction in the future. Over all a good start, albeit, a tad subjective. But hey, I dislike memoirs, as a general rule, so the fact that I read it and have positive things to say, means it was pretty good. show less

Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood is a work of nonfiction by Koren Zailckas, chronicling her love affair with alcohol. The book’s organizational structure is telling itself, split into four sections: “Initiation,” “The Usual,” “Excess,” and “Abuse.” It begins with Koren’s first taste, swigging sips of Southern Comfort on the sly, peer-pressured into it by her friend Natalie at age 14. Koren then moves through high school and college and has what almost anyone would consider a normal relationship with drinking throughout her education, although peppered with occasional moments of blackouts and vomiting. Within months of graduating college, she stops drinking altogether. While her experiences with alcohol aren’t show more unusual, I think her underlying motivations are.

Koren wants the reader to understand that she considers her drinking history overindulgent. She makes this clear on the cover, a seemingly real-life snapshot of the author slumped over in a chair, her hair gratefully covering her shameful face. She also punctuates the text with footnotes and statistics that tear the reader from the narrative, serving as a reminder that this book has an agenda. Heavy-handed tactics like these are informational and clearly prove that the problem is bigger than Koren herself, but give away the author’s secret: she didn’t think telling her story flat out would work as an allegory to apply to America at large. This detracted from all the wonderful attributes of the book, like Koren’s snarky sense of humor, her spot-on characterizations, and completely realistic retelling of the transition from childhood to adulthood, from innocence to wisdom, through the holding tank of extended adolescence called college. What’s unfortunate is that these wonderful facets of Koren’s writing could have easily made the story a very successful cautionary fable, rendering those distracting statistics unnecessary.

If this were a different story, with a different subject matter, I’m sure I’d love it. I love the author’s writing style, and she weaves a wonderful story. Smashed comes off as didactic though, narrating the various shames Koren experiences after drinking too much, the kind of things that are nationally publicized when they happen to today’s young starlets. This “Don’t turn into Paris Hilton” adage is clear from the beginning, and quickly becomes overkill.

The real problem, rather than Koren’s drinking, is her inability to stand on her own. She drinks because she surrounds herself with stronger personalities who drink, and follows their lead. She goes from person to person, admitting that she patterns all of her relationships, both platonic and romantic, after the one with Natalie, who “will be the blueprint for the kamikaze girlfriends… the suicidal personalities who seize the day by letting go of any expectations for a tomorrow.” If Koren chose better people with whom to surround herself, or if she blazed her own path rather than always passively going along with what was socially accepted, her life story would read very differently. She even uses alcohol as something to hide behind, something to rely upon to relate to people and use as her mouthpiece. It’s not her relating to others- it’s the booze. It wasn’t dependency on alcohol that thwarted her growth, but rather her dependency on others for identity and self-worth.

All that said, Smashed is still an entertaining, thoughtful, honest coming-of-age story. Koren Zailckas is a talented writer who I look forward to reading again, hoping her careful eye will be trained on personal strength rather than personal weakness. show less

Not only is this a true story of one girl 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. 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 show more taught that drugs are always dangerous, alcohol is perceived as an acceptable rite of passage. Her book is deeply moving. show less

This book is a memoir broken up into four ‘chapters’ wittily entitled “Initiation”, “the Usual”, “Excess”, and “Abuse”.

In “Initiation”, Zailckas enlightens the reader as to what lead to the beginnings of her alcoholism. Her first drinks hidden away at a social event are well documented, and many readers may be able to relate to her experience. She leads the reader into the tale of the first time she was officially “drunk” with a friend who disappears with a boy and comes back haunted from god only knows what. She vows to her parents at this time to watch out for her friends, and never to drink… which it is apparent was a total lie.

In “the Usual”, Zailckas moves on to tell about the ways in which show more drinking became natural and acceptable to her. In her daily life, there was no real repercussion for her drinking, and it was just settled in to by her and her friends. “Excess” shows Zailckas in her college years, becoming increasingly aware of how dangerously close to true alcoholism she is, and “Abuse” leads to the final acknowledgement of needing help for a socially and mentally destructive addiction.

The heights and depths of her experiences are almost nonexistent. Even though Zailckas never reports a real positive thing coming of drinking, she is constantly shocked by just how low and miserable her excessiveness can make her and her life. This memoir seemed quite naïve, even taking in to account how wise and eloquent the words could be.

Favorite Passages/Quotes

"But don't tell that to my brain because when I'm drunk, it purrs with the ecstasy of being thoroughly high … Amstel Light is my upper and my downer, it is my euphoric bump, my sweet nod into vagueness, the hallucinogenic that contorts my world into one that's worth living in.”

"[The party girl] will never stop making headlines in the New York Post for gargling champagne and lifting up her skirt…The party gal is a sad and beautiful ingénue, who appears in photographs with tousled hair, smudged eyeliner, and a visible thong. And as long as she exists in real life, we will never cease to be interested in her.”

"Every so often, you feel so lost in the hollow of your own need that you decide to try to hoist yourself out of it.”

Opinion

It’s hard to critique something plot-wise when it is a memoir. All I can say, really, is that this book progressed the way it should, but seemed to linger in repetition. In the immortal words of Pat McCurdy, “get up, go to work, get drunk, go to sleep”. Every (mis)adventure of Zailckas somehow ended up with her getting drunk to either ease the pain, or to celebrate along side her sorority sisters. I felt that there wasn’t really a lot of emphasis put on how wrong he choice of life was, even though she readily writes about how miserable she was and how she wished things had been different. Her own mother ignores her alcoholism like it is nothing, and there is a certain nonchalance she portrays about waking up one morning, unsure of whether or not she was still a virgin.

The flow of this book is quite unique. I really liked the movement between paragraphs. Zailckas gave a feeling of letting the reader simply reside in her mind and become privy to her stream-of-conscience thoughts. This was beautiful in the majority of the book, but there were plenty of places I felt the wording got too poetic to be able misery and the lust for alcohol. Parts of this book felt like a romance novel, reminiscing on the ‘good ol days’, but the majority stayed in the misery, self-loathing, and addiction realm. It was in no way an uplifting book, which isn’t bad. It was honest. There was a particularly interesting bit about a sorority sister who attempted suicide over something she believed Zailckas did which I found well-written.

Something I took a little conflict with was that this book had no real climax. The intention of writing is was apparent – to voice concern over alcoholism in young girls and the nonchalance it receives – but there was no real consequence for her. My meaning being this: most books that seek to educate by example have some major event that really forced the author to turn around their ways “or else”. Zailckas just realized all by herself through trial and error that this life was no good for her, so it is hard to see where the young girl who might be in Zailckas’ shoes will really feel a push to change, rather than seeking solace in another’s life knowing they aren’t alone in their alcohol abuse. It felt more like ‘misery loves company’ than ‘you need help, you’re an alcoholic’.

Rating: On a scale of 1-5 stars, this book is a 3.5. The flow of this book is enticing, but I felt it fell short in its message. I like a book to have some meaning in the end, and while it wraps up well, there was no climax to really necessitate that resolution. A book without a clear purpose, especially a memoir, is just a bunch of words that could go anywhere. For her first novel, Koren Zailckas has done an excellent job portraying a human side to the addict, even though parts will lead the reader skimming ahead instead of clinging to each word. show less

In Smashed, Zailckas is brutally honest despite the embarrassment this might cause her and blows the lid off of teenage drinking and its repercussions for young women. Her tale is more than just a indictment of drugs and alcohol though, it is a social commentary on the often negative interactions between collage-age guys and girls (with the girls usually coming out much worse for the wear). Smashed is insightful and dead-on. This is a must-read for every girl between the ages of 14 and 25 as well as for their parents.