Review of Koren Zailckas, Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

Like Caroline Knapp's " Drinking: A Love Story," and like Sarah Hepola's " Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget", Koren Zailckas' "Smashed" chronicles a young woman's increasing entanglement with alcohol, what happened during that (9 year) "relationship," and how, at the age of 23, she untied herself from the vice-grip of abusive drinking. Given this common theme, Knapp and Hepola and Zailckas all paint with similarly-colored palettes; but the portraits which result are as individualized as these three unique women.

Zailckas divides her book according to the main phases of her brief drinking career: (1) The Initiation: This includes her "First Taste," her "First Waste," and "First Offense" (i.e., the first time alcohol-related misbehavior strained her relationships). (2) The Usual: In college, drinking went from "novelty" to "everyday"--and drinking, in turn, structured her days into a "circular configuration, like a holding pattern" (page 120). (3) Excess: Upon joining a sorority, "excess is my main objective for any night....I aim to exceed a state of being just-drunk, and enter instead into a state...like annihilation of brain waves (page 157). (4) Abuse: By junior year of college, Zailckas begins to "see how deep into dependence [she is]" and makes attempts to "hoist [her]self out of it" (page 247).

And yet, though Zailckas' memoir unfolds in phases, suggesting a kind of progress, she also points out how alcohol-abuse leads to life-stagnation. After all, Zailckas observes that she began drinking to alleviate her feeling "ashamed, self-conscious and small" (page xvi)--only to end up, seven years later, feeling "sad and secretive and volatile" (page 265). Zailckas explicitly describes the vicious, stagnant circle: drinking ruptures her relationships, leading to regretful "sore spots"--but "this kind of self-loathing used to be the reason I drank in the first place" (page 264).

Zailckas' memoir is rich with remarks on relationships. Drinking promises a shortcut past the inner doubts and insecurities that make relating to others an awkward exercise; at first, drinking makes her feel "comfortable" and "confident" (page 24). But taking this shortcut comes with costs--at first subtle ones, then lead-heavy ones. Liquid courage lacks discretion: "I plunge into [situations], I feel frightened, and then I try to pull myself out" (page 269). Liquid courage also lacks what psychologists call "agency"--Zailckas writes of signing over "power of attorney" to alcohol (page 154), whereby it's no longer I who decides, but substances and situations and other people deciding for me. Add to this the creeping ubiquity of blackouts, of lengthening duration, and one can only guess at what was "decided" in one's "absence"--Zailckas starkly captures the eerie atmosphere of how "things you can't remember can terrorize you" (page 75), how the mental vacuums of forgotten events are rapidly rushed by "dread and denial that thickens with time like emotional scar tissue" (page xii).

Most of all, the alcoholic shortcut of liquid courage bears the price that the resulting relationships lack authenticity. "What's responsible for [this] light-headed feeling?" Zailckas finds herself wondering, "Is it the Molson or the boy who is running his fingers through the ends of your hair? Are you chatting because you're drunk, or because your connecting with someone? ... [W]hich came first, the liquor or the Greg?" (page 64) And once Zailckas abandons drinking, she's unable to relate to her friend and roommate Vanessa: "We've been inseparable for the past ten months, but we don't have a damn thing, aside from alcohol, to talk about" (page 324). Zailckas also points out that alcohol has a way of preempting relationships with constructive people: "I know that as long as I keep drinking," she writes, "I will drive back everyone who is good-natured. Only people who are as drunk and damaged as I am will stay" (page 330).

One last noteworthy nuance of Zailckas' memoir is the sparing sprinklings of literary and feminist spices. Zailckas brushes literary touchstones on recalling her journey: Rilke's "The Grown-Up," Plath's "Mushrooms," Laura Mulvey's " Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." And since alcohol surrenders agency, Zailckas points out how sobriety becomes a feminist choice: "I've learned," she writes, "that if any of us, girls and women, want true strength born of stability, we need to find a more productive outlet. Drinking...allows the world to rejoice in our weakness. Rather than turning our dissatisfaction inward..., rather than allowing our frustrations to be wasted and waste away inside of us, I think we should use them as ammunition against the world they were borne of" (page 333).

In all these ways (and more!) Zailckas' portrait is vivid, invigorating, and enlightening. I'd happily read it again.
 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1745418617