Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood - Softcover

Zailckas, Koren

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143036475 ISBN 13: 9780143036470

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2006

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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 Back Cover:

"Gripping... one of the best accounts of addiction, the college experience, or even what it means to be an average teenage girl in America. A."
–Entertainment Weekly

Bookstores are flooded with boozy bios by former girls gone wild. This one rises to the top.
—People

Poised and elegiac... Smashed goes down with a slow, genteel burn.
—The New York Times Book Review

A mortifyingly credible story.
—The New York Times

Brilliant and horrifying.
—The Baltimore Sun

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0143036475
• ISBN 13: 9780143036470
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384