Not your average after-school special
Melisssa Kunz
Issue date: 2/25/05 Section: Arts and Entertainment
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If you were to pick up a book about someone who spent over a decade in a near-perpetual alcohol stupor, you'd expect a raw, gritty tale full of disgusting imagery and harrowing vomit anecdotes meant to shock you into pledging to be dry for the rest of your life. You would not expect the following passage:
"My parents ground me for the rest of November, which is the cruelest season to be in lockdown. ... There are parties like I'll never know again. The air in the clearing smells of apple orchards, Bud Light, and pine-dense bonfire smoke."
Apple orchards and Bud Light? How terrifyingly... pastoral.
Such is the overall tone in Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, Koren Zailckas's (pronounced Zil-kiss, the author kindly points out while describing how new teachers butcher her name each fall) debut autobiographical account of an entire teenage experience dedicated to an array of poisons and their nasty aftereffects.
Zailckas takes her first sip of Southern Comfort at age 14 after spending a lazy summer day innocently swimming at her wild friend Natalie's lake house. The two proceed to fill apple juice containers with the stuff, head to an innocuous birthday party and initiate all the other girls into booze culture.
From there on out, Koren spends the rest of high school experimenting with different liquors and states of consciousness, getting drunk for the first time in a cemetery on Halloween with boys she doesn't know, sneaking out of a resort hotel to party with surfer college boys at age 15 and passing out on a dock at age 16 and having to be rushed to the hospital.
In college, our heroine finds herself at Syracuse University, a big place with an even bigger party scene, and few friends to be had unless, of course, you're into partying and liquor. The next four years of her life are spent drinking, puking, joining a booze-heavy sorority, pelting the Alpha Babes next door with eggs from a window, harassing the frat house across the street, getting harassed by the frat house across the street and bar cruising. High productivity levels indeed.
"My parents ground me for the rest of November, which is the cruelest season to be in lockdown. ... There are parties like I'll never know again. The air in the clearing smells of apple orchards, Bud Light, and pine-dense bonfire smoke."
Apple orchards and Bud Light? How terrifyingly... pastoral.
Such is the overall tone in Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, Koren Zailckas's (pronounced Zil-kiss, the author kindly points out while describing how new teachers butcher her name each fall) debut autobiographical account of an entire teenage experience dedicated to an array of poisons and their nasty aftereffects.
Zailckas takes her first sip of Southern Comfort at age 14 after spending a lazy summer day innocently swimming at her wild friend Natalie's lake house. The two proceed to fill apple juice containers with the stuff, head to an innocuous birthday party and initiate all the other girls into booze culture.
From there on out, Koren spends the rest of high school experimenting with different liquors and states of consciousness, getting drunk for the first time in a cemetery on Halloween with boys she doesn't know, sneaking out of a resort hotel to party with surfer college boys at age 15 and passing out on a dock at age 16 and having to be rushed to the hospital.
In college, our heroine finds herself at Syracuse University, a big place with an even bigger party scene, and few friends to be had unless, of course, you're into partying and liquor. The next four years of her life are spent drinking, puking, joining a booze-heavy sorority, pelting the Alpha Babes next door with eggs from a window, harassing the frat house across the street, getting harassed by the frat house across the street and bar cruising. High productivity levels indeed.