Drinking: an adolescent story
Memoir reveals a young life marred by alcohol
Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood
By Koren Zailckas
Viking, 343 pp., $21.95
It's hard to know if alcohol really was the organizing principle of Koren Zailckas's life or if it was simply the organizing principle of ''Smashed," her tightly focused memoir. Life, as Koren tells it, from 14 years old on, was a search for the next drink. Her desire for alcohol displaced everything -- friends, boyfriends, sex, family, school. She was not interested or engaged in anything except booze. And she was not alone.
Koren, a white, Catholic, middle-class teenager from Bolton, claims she is typical of that group nationwide. She cites numerous studies to support her claim that, like her, many teenagers start drinking early and warm to it as they get older.
According to Koren, teenagers drink not to prove they're tough and free, but to mask their panic, shyness, sadness, and self-loathing. She writes that alcohol allowed her to feel less ashamed, less self-conscious. As a junior high school girl with a drink in her, she is ''exotic and dangerous . . . a cobra inside a kitty cat."
She has her first drink when she is 14 with Natalie, a reckless bully. Koren describes how Southern Comfort's ''soft heat radiates in waves down my drowsy arms" and how Natalie is tender afterward. The sexual rhythm of the episode is not accidental. No other scene is described at such length or with such erotic delicacy.
After her first blackout, at 16, Koren wakes up at home in bed without her underpants on. With mounting anxiety, she discovers she's in a hospital gown and booties. She has no memory of a party, a shower, a hospital procedure, but her worst fear is that her friends saw her with her pants down. Since this is her first offense, her parents pretend it's not serious. They choose optimism, the easy way out. They continue to ignore what must be clear signs of trouble, giving Koren Malibu rum as a Christmas present, encouraging her to order a drink on her 21st birthday.
In junior high and high school, Koren needs parties to give her an opportunity to drink. By the time she's at Syracuse University, alcohol structures her day. She depends on a cycle of afternoon classes, followed by evenings of drinks, followed by mornings of nausea and numbness, concluding with deep sleep. By afternoon, the hangovers abate sufficiently for her to attempt afternoon classes again.
She chooses her best friends for their affection for drink and affinity for risk. After Natalie, there is Elle, then Vanessa, a string of similarly self-absorbed and self-destructive young women. Koren has no boyfriends and little curiosity about boys or sex. She is date-raped while drunk and unconscious at the end of her first year in college and consents to sex only well into her third year. When she willingly enters a sexual relationship, it is not out of desire but out of a need to feel grown up. There is no description of the act. She says flatly, ''I prefer booze to boys." For her, sex is a chore to get through.
After a night of rough sex she can't recall, she quotes Milton to herself while inspecting her body for bruises: ''He who overcomes by force overcomes by half his foe." What is odd about this is not only that she sees her partner as an enemy and is detached enough to quote poetry while checking for injuries, but that she has read Milton. It is a surprise that she has read anything and that her mind is clear enough to absorb and retain verse. Apparently there is poetry in her head as well as alcohol in her veins. Who knew? And who knew she was planning to be a journalist or was agile enough to become a cheerleader? In college, her most sustained social engagement is with Zeta, the bad-girl sorority she pledges. Zetas ''are the hipsters, the hippies, the rock-and-roll girls, and the renegades." They are also hammered or stoned most of the time.
Koren's distance from her negligent parents is unexplored, as is her obvious hostility to men. Then, suddenly, after college, there is a change. She wants to remain sober and hold on to her boyfriend. She acknowledges that she will always be uptight and anxious but resolves to accept these traits rather than remove them with alcohol. One wants to believe that this change is permanent, but it is hard to believe that a young woman who has never confronted her obvious contempt for and rage at men or acknowledged her anger at her absent and ignorant parents could have a successful future.
Like many other smashed teenagers, Koren has wasted much of her young life. She can't remember many crucial parts of it. The ones she can recall -- her introduction to alcohol in junior high school and her early exploitation of drink as her way to social ease -- are harrowing. Somewhere along the line, she learned to tell a riveting story. But it is less clear that she has learned to live a good life. Moving from smashed to whole takes more than narrative talent. Someone has to pick up the pieces and put them together carefully. Although Koren has described many of the pieces with precision, she has a very short perspective and very slight insight. And all the pieces may not be there anymore.
Barbara Fisher is a freelance critic who lives in New York. 