Smashed : Growing Up a Drunk Girl - Hardcover

Zailckas, Koren

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0091905591 ISBN 13: 9780091905590

Publisher: Ebury Press, 2005

Synopsis

The day Koren turned fourteen she emerged from her friend's kitchen clutching a bottle of Southern Comfort. At fifteen she and Natalle sneaked out one summer night, then next morning had to plece back together forgotten fragments of drink, men and misplaced clothes. At sixteen she was carried through the hospital doors unconscious. And so it began...Koren was a sweet and normal teenager, from a stable home and loving parents, yet throughout her teens and twenties she regularly drank herself to the point of obllvion. This is the shocking but utterly recognisable story of a girl who used alcohol to help herself grow up. It began by making her feel better and making life seem less scary. It helped her know who she was, how she felt. Over time, though, she found herself almost unable to meet anyone new or embark on any social occasion at college and, later, in work, without being drunk. Finally, Koren's experimentation descended into a chaotic, dangerous dependency, until, one day, she decided she needed help. Smashed is a beautifully written book and a brutally honest account of just how easy it is to surrender your life to binge drinking. Sometimes funny, sometimes terrifying, it is unfallingly sympathetic. Told in a voice that compels but never preaches, this is a book that needed to be written and demands to be read.

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: Ebury Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0091905591
• ISBN 13: 9780091905590
• Binding: Hardcover