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, a 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 gets to the meaning beneath the seeming banality of girls' getting drunk. She persuades 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 judgment, 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 binging.
Like the contemporary masterpieces The Liars' Club, Autobiography of a Face, and Jarhead, Smashed is destined to become a classic. 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 over-drinking or of someone they love, Smashed is an eye-opening, wise, and utterly gripping achievement.
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"In the Book Smashed by Koren Zailckas, the readers are informed of her childhood and teen years as an alcoholic. The main character is Koren a little girl at the time. The main settings are at her friends houses, parties that she would find out about and her house. The main setting is at the college where she attended (Syracuse University). What stands out in my mind is all that time that she drank, and she did not die. I like the part where she is in college and she is about to join the Zeta's and she has to go sober for a while, i really like this part because it just showed all the frustration and the yearning that she had for alcohol. This reminds me of the times that I have been to a family party and all of my uncles and cousins are drinking, it reminded me of how she (Koren)got out of hand and would be violent. That is when i was reminded of my uncles who are binge drinkers and they get really violent when they have had an excessive amount of alcohol. I did not like the part where she describes how she was the night after she had sex for the first time, that is something that should not be announced to the public. The authors message tot he readers is, Drinking is not good for you because it will lead you to many things that you are not expecting to do. For example having a relationship with a person you just meet or staying longer than you intended, even paying more than you wanted to spend. I would recommend this book to people who do not drink so that they know that drinking will destroy the person that their parents have raised, affect them academically as well as physical and mentally. I would not recommend this book to people who do not like books that give good descriptions of everything that happens, and to people who are against drinking. Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood"
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Melissa (5 out of 5 stars)