The Perils, Thrills of a <i>Smashed</i> Life

When my mom called to say she had something for me, the thought of baked goods popped into mind. Later on, when she dropped off not a brownie but a book, I was taken aback. She expects me to read a non-school book in the middle of the semester?

But Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood should be on every college student’s personal syllabus. I devoured—cover to cover—it more quickly than one of my mother’s chocolate treats. And now I am passing it on to everyone I know.

Smashed has been a smash hit in the one month it’s been on the market, making author Koren Zailckas, 24, an instant celebrity. The book has garnered praise from reviewers ranging from Entertainment Weekly to conservative New York Times columnist William Safire. Zailckas has appeared on ABC’s “Good Morning America” and last month drew an audience of more than 100 students when she spoke at Boston University. Her autobiography is not just for college kids, or even binge drinkers: it speaks to anyone who has ever experienced insecurity and sought out a crutch.

Zalickas may be an unusually gifted writer, but her experiences are startlingly universal. She grew up in Massachusetts, majored in English at Syracuse University, and then moved to New York to work in publishing. Along the way—starting with a tumbler of Southern Comfort at age 14—drinking trailed Zalickas on her path. Alcohol is the lens through which she views her adolescent development. In the book she tries to chart who she has become and why, and mainly, to make sense of all the things that simply don’t—why an intelligent, kind, and beautiful girl would drink enough to nearly kill herself and end up hospitalized at 16, or why she’d keep on doing it for six more years.

The crutch that seemed to help at first ended up preventing Zailckas from standing on her own two feet. Smashed is the lonely history of how alcohol tore her life apart, in ways that anyone who has unwittingly hurt themselves or others can begin to comprehend. “In the end,” Zailckas writes, “I quit drinking because I didn’t want to waste any more time picking up the pieces. I decided smashed, when it’s used as a synonym for drunk, is a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Zailckas’ painful honesty often cuts uncomfortably close to home. It would be easy to write off her story as some other college’s frat scene, but it’s not. She writes for everyone who has ever felt less than whole through the pains of adolescence and the haphazardness of college, and then tried to piece a life together.