Collena Koren
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Koren Zailckas had her first drink at 14, was continuously hammered by 16, had a sexual misadventure at 19, and sobered up two years ago. Shes 24.
Her memoir, one of the more garish entries in the burgeoning modern youth confessional, might give you a hangover. It also suggests that now that Zailckas has purged herself of her all-too-lurid and remarkably packed past, she might well write good fiction.
Considering how she squandered her memory, she has an eye for detail – and statistics – to justify her cautionary tale.
“In the past decade alone,” she writes in the preface, “girls have closed the gender gap in terms of drinking. I wrote this book because girls are drinking as much, and as early, as boys for the first time in history – a 2001 study showed 40 percent of college girls binge drink.”
Among the no-nos Zailckas describes in Technicolor: Syracuse University, where you might not want your kid to go unless he or she hooks up with an inspiring teacher; sororities and fraternities; alcohol advertising, which Zailckas claims undermines every effort to gain emotional strength, particularly in women; and a society that treats alcohol as far less harmful than illegal drugs.
Writing “Smashed” was clearly therapeutic for Zailckas, who quit booze without Alcoholics Anonymous. That she found a good man may have helped, but her will and pride were paramount. God knows she went through self-imposed hell before she saw her way clear.
“It is my first blackout,” she writes after waking up in a hospital, her hair matted and arms bruised, her co-dependent friends eager to clarify what happened.
“I will never again experience one so comprehensive – I passed out on the dock in a puddle of my own vomit. I imagine it was mostly liquor because my dad told the doctor I didnt eat dinner that night. Before that, I pulled my shirt up over my shoulders to show my bra to someones brother because, knowing I was slipping into oblivion, hed asked me what color it was.”The picture doesnt get prettier.
Relive the 80s and 90s as Zailckas bluffs her talented, loner way through grade school and high school, her parents concerned but also enabling (to be precise, her mother is shaming, her father indulgent).
In her