Mary Karr, author of The Liar's Club and Cherry
"Zailckas has captured what's unfortunately become a quintessential American girlhood."
David Jernigan PhD, Research Director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth
"Smashed blows to smithereens the myth that alcohol is the 'safe drug' in young people’s lives."
Martha Tod Dudman, author of Augusta, Gone
"Koren Zailckas' story is raw and terrifying. Every daughter's mother should read this book."
David Jernigan PhD, Research Director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth
"Smashed blows to smithereens the myth that alcohol is the 'safe drug' in young people’s lives."
Martha Tod Dudman, author of Augusta, Gone
"Koren Zailckas' story is raw and terrifying. Every daughter's mother should read this book."
Rachel Simmons, author of Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls.
"Zailckas' writing is exhilarating. Smashed burns the page with insight that belongs to women far beyond her years."
From Kirkus Reviews
"An astonishing revealing debut...riveting, with a powerful message for parents of teenaged girls."
Metro
...recalls the numbed, anguished world of Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Sunday Times
"Smashed is heavily attuned to the miseries of being female and young...gripping in its immediacy and self-exposure."
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
Book Description
From earliest experimentation to habitual excess to full-blown abuse, twenty-four-year-old Koren Zailckas leads us through her experience of a terrifying trend among young girls, exploring how binge drinking becomes routine, how it becomes "the usual." With the stylistic freshness of a poet and the dramatic gifts of a novelist, Zailckas describes her first sip at fourteen, alcohol poisoning at sixteen, blacked-out sexual experience at nineteen, total disorientation after waking up in an unfamiliar New York City apartment at twenty-two, when she realized she had to stop, and all the depression, rage, troubled friendships, and sputtering romantic connections in between. Zailckas's unflinching candor and exquisite analytical eye get to the meaning beneath the seeming banality of girls getting drunk. She convinces us that her story is the story of thousands of girls like her who are not alcoholics--yet--but who use booze as a short cut to courage, a stand-in for good judgement, and a bludgeon for shyness, each of them failing to see how their emotional distress, unarticulated hostility, and depression are entangled with their socially condoned bingeing.
A crucial book for any woman who has succumbed to oblivion through booze, or for anyone ready to face the more subtle repercussions of their own chronic overdrinking or of someone they love, Smashed is an eye-opening, wise, and utterly gripping tour de force.
From the Publisher
A beautifully written and deeply moving account of an adolescence shaped by alcohol - already a bestseller in hardback
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
From the Author
In the past decade alone, girls have closed the gender gap in terms of drinking. I wrote "Smashed" because girls are drinking as much, and as early, as boys for the first time in history, because there has been a threefold increase in the number of women who get drunk at least ten times a month, and because a 2001 study showed 40 percent of college girls binge drink. When you factor in increased rates of depression, suicide, alcohol poisoning, and sexual assault, plus emerging research that suggests women who drink have greater chances of liver disease, reproductive disorders, and brain abnormalities, the consequences of alcohol abuse are far heavier for girls than boys.
From the Inside Flap
"Koren Zailckas chronicles, in detail both grim and marvelous, the hair-raising drunkalogue that so many college kids go through without becoming full fledged drunks. (Around one-third of kids on campus drink like alcoholics, estimates claim.) But the wit and insight rampant in the prose of SMASHED raises the book far above the issue of young drinking. Zailckas has captured what's unfortunately become a quintessential American girlhood."
- Mary Karr, author of The Liar's Club and Cherry
"A well-written and jarring memoir, SMASHED blows to smithereens the myth that alcohol is the 'safe drug' in young people’s lives. Koren Zailckas puts a personal face on the leading drug problem among our youth, and shows the side of teen drinking that won’t appear in a beer ad."
- David Jernigan PhD, Research Director, Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth
About the Author
Koren Zailckas grew up in the suburbs of Boston. She attended Syracuse University, which was featured in a Time cover article about young women and drinking. Zailckas lives in New York City. This is her first book.
Excerpted from Smashed: Growing Up a Drunk Girl by Koren Zailckas. Copyright © 2006. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
FIRST TASTE
TO THIS DAY, I can't remember when I had my first kiss. I can't tell you how old I was, if it was a moment in May, if I closed my eyes or left them open. The memory is long gone. My mind tossed it out with the bathwater of experience, with TV and takeout and chitchat, the brief intervals of time that simply never soaked in. That kiss, though historical, was in no way historic. It was a tree that fell in the forest. And I didn't make a sound.
I remember other firsts shallowly, like the type of big Broadway plays where the scenery is more moving than the spectacle. Today, any emotion that was evoked by those rites escapes me. I can only recall in detail the rows of white chiffon on my First Communion dress, or the torn vinyl seats of the school bus on my first day of school. I can't remember the trauma of my first period, or the year (was it sixth grade or seventh?), but I know that I told my mother about it in the front yard, where she was watering the hydrangea tree with a green rubber hose. The memory of the first time I drove the family Ford has been reduced to a vacant parking lot. My first sex has the solid darkness of its windowless room.
But like most women, I remember my first drink in tender minutiae.
The exact date is June 17, 1994. I am fourteen, which is the norm these days, when the mean age of the first drink for girls is less than thirteen years old. I am a few days shy of my eighthgrade graduation. Summer vacation looms close, and just beyond it, regional high school. In the interim is public school mania, a collective chaos brought on by high temperatures and lettered report cards, when even teachers slam closed The Metamorphosis and let classes out ahead of the bell.
It's Friday and I'm spending the weekend at Natalie Burke's summer cottage on Lake Pleasant, which in my mind has the exoticism of St. Bart's. The cottage is small, a single-story, but we move around it as we please because Mr. and Mrs. Burke often work well into prime time. Its rooms bulge with wicker furniture, wind chimes, Bonsai trees in clay pots, framed star- fish on the walls, a thick shag carpet that always smells like sunscreen, and a china cabinet stacked with party napkins and Thai cookbooks, Natalie's old Cosmopolitans, and her parents' old Vanity Fairs. A string of white lights on the deck, which are left to sway in the wind year-round, are a continual reminder of the indefinite nature of our holiday. All in all, there is nothing to encourage us that the rules of our ordinary lives apply here.
It is another afternoon of Natalie and I alone, together. We spend it sunbathing on the roof and swimming unsupervised. Natalie's parents forbid us to do both, but we can't be bothered with cautionary tales while the sun is still high and motorboats skid viscously past the end of the dock.
It is seven o'clock when we towel off. A few months ago, it would have been twilight. But, since it's summer, the sky hasn't darkened past pale pink. Through the sliding glass door, the sun looks defiant. It sits bloated and orange above the lake's public beach, like another inflatable ball kids forgot in the reeds when they left for the day.
I am standing Speedo-ed in the kitchen, sliding an elastic strap down over one shoulder and examining a faint tan line. The baby oil Natalie made me rub on instead of sunscreen has left my skin feeling buttery and somehow sexy, like it's a waste that no one will touch it but me. Still, I haven't browned past the color Natalie calls "Bisque," after a tin of loose powder in her makeup chest. Bisque is a winter color, she says. I should sun myself until I can wear the same color she does-Toast-which is a warm tan she tops with Raspberry Jam blush. I tell her the oil didn't work; I'm as Bisque as ever.
I am talking too loud because my ears are stopped up from a violent plunge off the end of the dock. Water is dripping down the tips of my hair and splattering the kitchen tiles where Natalie is crouched over an open cabinet like someone searching for a spare deck of playing cards.
Only she comes up with a bottle. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
TO THIS DAY, I can't remember when I had my first kiss. I can't tell you how old I was, if it was a moment in May, if I closed my eyes or left them open. The memory is long gone. My mind tossed it out with the bathwater of experience, with TV and takeout and chitchat, the brief intervals of time that simply never soaked in. That kiss, though historical, was in no way historic. It was a tree that fell in the forest. And I didn't make a sound.
I remember other firsts shallowly, like the type of big Broadway plays where the scenery is more moving than the spectacle. Today, any emotion that was evoked by those rites escapes me. I can only recall in detail the rows of white chiffon on my First Communion dress, or the torn vinyl seats of the school bus on my first day of school. I can't remember the trauma of my first period, or the year (was it sixth grade or seventh?), but I know that I told my mother about it in the front yard, where she was watering the hydrangea tree with a green rubber hose. The memory of the first time I drove the family Ford has been reduced to a vacant parking lot. My first sex has the solid darkness of its windowless room.
But like most women, I remember my first drink in tender minutiae.
The exact date is June 17, 1994. I am fourteen, which is the norm these days, when the mean age of the first drink for girls is less than thirteen years old. I am a few days shy of my eighthgrade graduation. Summer vacation looms close, and just beyond it, regional high school. In the interim is public school mania, a collective chaos brought on by high temperatures and lettered report cards, when even teachers slam closed The Metamorphosis and let classes out ahead of the bell.
It's Friday and I'm spending the weekend at Natalie Burke's summer cottage on Lake Pleasant, which in my mind has the exoticism of St. Bart's. The cottage is small, a single-story, but we move around it as we please because Mr. and Mrs. Burke often work well into prime time. Its rooms bulge with wicker furniture, wind chimes, Bonsai trees in clay pots, framed star- fish on the walls, a thick shag carpet that always smells like sunscreen, and a china cabinet stacked with party napkins and Thai cookbooks, Natalie's old Cosmopolitans, and her parents' old Vanity Fairs. A string of white lights on the deck, which are left to sway in the wind year-round, are a continual reminder of the indefinite nature of our holiday. All in all, there is nothing to encourage us that the rules of our ordinary lives apply here.
It is another afternoon of Natalie and I alone, together. We spend it sunbathing on the roof and swimming unsupervised. Natalie's parents forbid us to do both, but we can't be bothered with cautionary tales while the sun is still high and motorboats skid viscously past the end of the dock.
It is seven o'clock when we towel off. A few months ago, it would have been twilight. But, since it's summer, the sky hasn't darkened past pale pink. Through the sliding glass door, the sun looks defiant. It sits bloated and orange above the lake's public beach, like another inflatable ball kids forgot in the reeds when they left for the day.
I am standing Speedo-ed in the kitchen, sliding an elastic strap down over one shoulder and examining a faint tan line. The baby oil Natalie made me rub on instead of sunscreen has left my skin feeling buttery and somehow sexy, like it's a waste that no one will touch it but me. Still, I haven't browned past the color Natalie calls "Bisque," after a tin of loose powder in her makeup chest. Bisque is a winter color, she says. I should sun myself until I can wear the same color she does-Toast-which is a warm tan she tops with Raspberry Jam blush. I tell her the oil didn't work; I'm as Bisque as ever.
I am talking too loud because my ears are stopped up from a violent plunge off the end of the dock. Water is dripping down the tips of my hair and splattering the kitchen tiles where Natalie is crouched over an open cabinet like someone searching for a spare deck of playing cards.
Only she comes up with a bottle. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
