From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This isn't just one girl's story of sneaking drinks in junior high, creeping out for night-long keg parties in high school and binge-drinking weeknights and weekends through college—it's also a valuable cautionary tale. At 24 (her present age), Zailckas gave up drinking after a decade of getting drunk, having blackouts and experiencing brushes with comas, date rape and suicide. She weaves disturbing statistics (from Harvard School of Public Heath studies and elsewhere) into her memoir: most girls will have their first drink by age 12, and will have the experience of being drunk by 14; teenage girls drink as much as their male peers, but their bodies process it badly (they get drunk faster, stay drunk longer and are more likely to die of alcohol poisoning); and date rape and booze go hand-in-hand. Zailckas had alcohol poisoning at 16 after a night of downing shots at a party with friends, but having her stomach pumped in the emergency room and enduring a month of being grounded didn't check her desire to drink. Fraternity keg parties led to drunken sexual encounters not-quite-remembered; drinking began to replace intimacy. Alcohol defined Zailckas's adolescence and college years to such an extent that, as she tells it, she lacks the tools to be an adult: she's unsure how to maintain relationships and unclear about sex without an alcohol buzz. Zailckas is unsparingly insightful and acutely aware of what drinking can and does do to girls. She explains that while kids are taught that drugs are always dangerous, alcohol is perceived as an acceptable rite of passage. Her book is deeply moving, written in poetic, nuanced prose that never obscures the dangerous truths she seeks to reveal. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Zailckas doesn't have the "genetically based reaction to alcohol that addiction counselors call 'a disease.'" But throughout her adolescence and early adulthood, she abused alcohol heavily: "I drank for the explicit purpose of getting drunk, getting brave, or medicating my moods." Her first sips of hard liquor, before she started high school, hit her with the force of a crush-- "as hopeful and as heartbreaking as kissing a boy." By the time she entered Syracuse University, she had already been hospitalized for alcohol poisoning, and her binge drinking through college, wholly supported by the Greek system, contributed to heartbreaking, empty sexual encounters and difficulty relating to anyone without "the third wheel" of alcohol. Zailckas muses about the societal factors that contribute to the astonishing rise in women's drinking. Most unnerving, though, are her honest, detailed accounts of her own profound abuse, which was accepted, encouraged, and chillingly commonplace; thousands of young women share her story. Like Caroline Knapp's Drinking: A Love Story (1996), this raw, eye-opening memoir will deepen readers' understanding of American culture and perhaps their own lives. Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Mary Karr, author of The Liars' Club and Cherry
"Zailckas has captured what's unfortunately become a quintessential American girlhood."

David Jernigan PhD, Research Director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth
"Smashed blows to smithereens the myth that alcohol is the 'safe drug' in young people’s lives."

Martha Tod Dudman, author of Augusta, Gone
"Koren Zailckas' story is raw and terrifying. Every daughter's mother should read this book."

Rachel Simmons, author of Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls.
"Zailckas' writing is exhilarating. Smashed burns the page with insight that belongs to women far beyond her years."

Kirkus Reviews
"An astonishing revealing debut...riveting, with a powerful message for parents of teenaged girls."

Book Description
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.

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.

About the Author
Koren Zailckas grew up in the suburbs of Boston. She studied under Mary Karr at Syracuse University, which was featured in a Time cover article about young women and drinking. This is her first book.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers
Perhaps the most cautionary aspect of Zailckas' eye-opening account of girlhood alcohol abuse is the fact that her story is surprisingly common. Like many girls, she took her first tentative sips at the age of 14. Two years later, she would remember few details of the night she landed -- bruised, filthy, and completely spent -- in the local emergency room, a couple of drinks away from death by alcohol poisoning.

Zailckas uses lyrical and often poetic language to narrate her ugly downward spiral. From thrill-seeking teenager to blacked-out sorority girl, she refuses to flinch at the disclosure of the humiliating details of her past. She wants to tell her story, and she wants to tell it honestly, as a warning to those girls who would potentially follow in her footsteps.

This terrible societal trend needs courageous women like Zailckas to sound the horn. Today, young girls drink in greater numbers than ever before, and they often binge-drink. Alcohol does for them what it has long done for others: gives false courage, numbs emotional pain, and provides a few hours in which, against all evidence, life seems to be okay. Fans of Goat and A Million Little Pieces will appreciate the sincerity of this memoir; admirers of Odd Girl Out and Reviving Ophelia would do well to read it, too. (Spring 2005 Selection)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

From earliest experimentation to habitual excess to full-blown abuse, twenty-four-year-old KorenZailckas leads us through her experience of a terrifying trend among young girls, exploring how binge drinking becomes routine, how it becomes ￯﾿ﾽthe usual.￯﾿ﾽ 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.

Author Biography: Koren Zailckas grew up in the suburbs of Boston. She studied under Mary Karr at Syracuse University, which was featured in a Time cover article about young women and drinking. This is her first book.

FROM THE CRITICS

Janet Maslin - The New York Times

… Ms. Zailckas somehow stayed sharp enough to remember the most humiliating things that happened to her. At the same time, she got drunk with a frequency and variety that translate into a whole book's worth of 100-proof cautionary tales. Her memoir offers a mortifyingly credible story of smart young women doing stuporous things.

Library Journal

Zailckas, 24, charts her relationship with alcohol from first taste at 14 to eventual abstinence at 23. Her cast of supporting drinkers reveals that her alcohol abuse-"highlights" of which include alcohol poisoning at 16 and a blackout with possible loss of virginity in college-is not uncommon. These women drink as a method of socializing and as a seeming means to deal with rage, self-doubt, and depression. Alcohol was the author's preferred conduit of bonding with other women, yet it prevented her from forming meaningful relationships. While Zailckas's writing lacks the humor of Augusten Burroughs's Dry, her rather poetic prose works to reveal a problem that goes beyond the personal. However, her own story remains the strongest and most moving aspect of the book, despite tiresome rants against the alcohol industry's glamorization of drinking and the government's and colleges' lame campaigns against problem drinking. Overall, a powerful memoir; recommended for large collections and especially high school and college libraries.-Amanda Glasbrenner, New York Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews