April 7-13, 2005

book quicks

Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

by Andrew Milner

By Koren Zailckas Viking, 368 pp., $21.95

"Like most women, I remember my first drink in tender minutiae," Koren Zailckas writes. "The exact date is June 17, 1994. I am fourteen, which is the norm these days, when the mean age of the first drink for girls is less than thirteen." Zailckas describes her subsequent decade of drinking in her perceptive new memoir, Smashed.

After sneaking drinks and getting her stomach pumped in high school, Zailckas enrolled at Syracuse University where alcohol was a respite from a wintry, desolate environment: "Drinking, which was once a novelty, will become the usual. Drinking will give college a circular configuration, like a holding pattern I can navigate while I await clearance in the real world."

Housed in an impersonal high-rise dorm, she joined a sorority where bar hopping was expected. During one drinking blackout she either did or did not lose her virginity to a frat brother, a girlfriend reassuring her, "If you can't remember it, it never really happened, anyway." She and her peers often went to class wearing pajamas, too hungover to get dressed. "During a particularly silent Friday-morning class, a teacher will say, to the rows of students drooping over the kidney-shaped surfaces of their school desks, "It looks like you all started the weekend early.'" And we wonder why so many professors would rather take sabbaticals and write for obscure journals than teach undergraduates.

After commencement, Zailckas expects to "find paradise in the "real world,' where there are men seeking meaningful relationships, jobs in media, and cheap and spacious lofts in major cities." This self-deprecating narration raises her book above typical Just Say No lecturing. It's an accomplished first book and unflinching examination of a genuine sociological problem. And if parents of high schoolers start bringing copies of Smashed to guided tours of the Syracuse campus, school officials will quickly learn if there really is no such thing as bad publicity.