Excerpts from Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, by Koren Zailckas

“Of course, Coors isn't crank or coke or crack.   And Heineken isn't heroin.   And vodka isn't Valium.  

"And nothing that's mixed with cranberry juice will score you respect with the folks who cop drugs in the public bathroom in Tompkins Square Park.  

"But don't tell that to my brain because when I'm drunk, it purrs with the ecstasy of being thoroughly high … Amstel Light is my upper and my downer, it is my euphoric bump, my sweet nod into vagueness, the hallucinogenic that contorts my world into one that's worth living in.  

"After two beers, there is no question as to whether I should have two more.   After four, my world is the first forty minutes of a movie so moving I can't bear for it to end, or a cake so sweet I can't help but cut another, and then another, sliver.   My reality is a climax so close I can't bear to pull away.”   (page 158)

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“The party girl has always existed, and it appears that she will simply never go away, particularly in the era of tabloid television shows in which cameramen stalk Los Angeles nightclubs in the hope of provoking a shit-faced starlet to flash the finger.  

"The party girl will never stop running up five-thousand-dollar bar tabs, puking in the bathroom at Lot 61, or getting kicked out of Vegas nightclubs while screaming “Don't you know who I am?”  

"She will never stop making headlines in the New York Post for gargling champagne and lifting up her skirt…The party gal is a sad and beautiful ingenue, who appears in photographs with tousled hair, smudged eyeliner, and a visible thong.   And as long as she exists in real life, we will never cease to be interested in her.” (page 185)

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“The life of a young drunk is not a continuous fall into the pit of abject alcohol abuse.   It is a herky-jerky evolution.  

"You slip, you trip, and you tumble into the habit of drinking when you are afraid, or enraged, or heartsick, and every so often, you hit a ledge from which you can see how deep into dependence you are.  

"Every so often, you feel so lost in the hollow of your own need that you decide to try to hoist yourself out of it.

"And you think you should be able to clamber out.   You should be able to rise above your voracity for vodka because there are people everywhere, reminding you that this is a life-stage behavior that every girl eventually outgrows.  

"But that kind of climb is not easy, it is not even possible, when you have no other reserves of strength.   When all your endurance is tied up in drinking, there is nothing else that can hold you.  

"Without it, you tire in no time.   You get scared, you surrender, and you slide even deeper into drinking.” (pages 247-248)

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Book Description:

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, and total disorientation after waking up in an unfamiliar New York City apartment at age 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 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 bingeing.

Above text and excerpts from author page
http://www.korenzailckas.com/

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Comments by Stanton Peele:

"Koren Zailckas, author of the book, Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood... never sought treatment, graduated college and began writing and formed a serious relationship, and ceased her dependence on alcohol.

"Moreover, she continues – to the objections of alcoholism counselors – to reject the alcoholic label: 'I don’t identify myself as an alcoholic. . . . In my mind, the whole point of Smashed is to say, you don’t have to be a quote-unquote alcoholic in order to examine the underlying reasons why you're drinking.'

"She even thinks that by 'branding' themselves alcoholics, young people can hinder their outgrowing abusive, even alcoholic, drinking."

From article: Wait a Second – You Mean Most People Overcome Alcoholism Without Treatment?

Book: Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood by Koren Zailckas