Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

Zailckas, Koren

ISBN 10: 1400151546 ISBN 13: 9781400151547

Publisher: Tantor Audio, 2005

Synopsis

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.

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: Tantor Audio
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1400151546
• ISBN 13: 9781400151547
• Binding: MP3 CD