Zailckas, Koren. Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood. NEW YORK: Penguin, 2005, 339 pp.
Awards: None. This book has been favorably and extensively reviewed by those nice folks at The New York Times Book Review, as well as The Los Angeles Times Book Review, Anderson Cooper on CNN, Entertainment Weekly, and enjoys a starred review at Publishers Weekly . . .
Genre: Autobiography (non-fiction), teen drinking, drug/alcohol abuse, coming of age, women's issues, alcoholism.
Here's what Miss Martha says about Smashed . . .
Synopsis:
Koren Zailckas (ZELL-Kiss) took her first drink of alcohol while sitting on the kitchen floor with her fellow 14-year old ne'er-do-well cronie, Natalie. Immediately, she fell in love and lust. Alcohol would continue to outshine every teen idol, boyfriend, or natural high for the next 9 years of her life. Zailckas chronicles her tumultuous affair with alcohol from middle school through college graduation, and on to the moment in her early twenties when she put down the bottle for the last time. She takes the reader along with her as she drifts from highs to lows, from parties to hangovers, and from being a follower to being a self-possessed, though still fragile and introverted, young woman. She spares few details in her honest retellings of frat parties gone bad, of waking up in a hospital after an overdose, of personal and shared experiences with blackouts, and of the reasons why she believes she sought alcohol the moment after she met it for the first time . . .
Review:
I've never been one to shy away from hosting happy hour on my front porch or wiling away an evening listening to live music while sharing a pitcher of this or that, but I don't think I'll be doing either of those activities any time soon without reflecting on the myriad factoids and stories about women and alcohol that are documented by this (23-year old!) author in her memoir. The first-person narrative sucks you in immediately. Koren Zailckas is a complex and accomplished writer who blends beautiful prose, hard sociological, psychological and medical facts, and stream of consciousness re-tellings in a well-paced, emotionally honest parable about young women and alcohol. Actually, it's about women and alcohol, in general. I didn't know, for example, that the number of women who binge drink (have more than 4 drinks in one sitting) more than 3 times in 2 weeks has tripled in recent years (!) And there's more, a lot more . . .
I chose this book partly because I was looking for a memoir (always something that appealed to my friends and me in high school) and also because I ran with a fairly hard-drinking crowd in high school. I wanted to see what the author had to say. I'm so glad I picked up this book. While I found it incredibly disturbing, I am grateful for being disturbed. Sometimes it takes a book like this to jar us out of our comfortable preconceptions that we take for granted as "truths." For example: many of us feel that alcohol isn't as dangerous as hard drugs. Zailckas proves otherwise. Many parents would rather their teens drink than do drugs. Zailckas pokes plate-sized holes in that preference.
Zailckas takes us from 14-year-old Koren through 23-year-old Koren, and through all of the stages of her emotional and physical development and experiences. She addresses issues of sexuality, self-image, cliques, academics, mother/daughter relationships, addiction, and depression, to name a few.
I am now going to make some more (see SPEAK blog) irresponsible gross generalizations: EVERY parent of an adolescent should read this book. EVERY teenage girl should read this book.
There. I feel better.
Now . . . moving on to being a responsible classroom teacher: This book should be recommended carefully. It contains scenes of drunken abandon, suggested rape, drug use, sex, and wanton drinking games described in detail (how would you like some parent to tell you that their teen learned a drinking game from an assigned reading?!? I'm sure Clawhammer would love that phone call!!) . This is a book that I might suggest to a high school girl who has friends who are drinking a lot. I do not doubt that this book, once it found its way into the hands of one teenager, would be passed around in school hallways much like Go Ask Alice and Can Steffie Come Out to Play were back in my day. Zailckas' honesty is compelling, as are the horrors she relates. Teens are simply too curious to shy away if given the opportunity to read books like this one. Unfortunately, teens also believe they are going to live forever, and often have an "it can't happen to me" attitude. For those who are deeper, more realistic thinkers, this book could serve as a much-needed cautionary tale.
Unless I were in a highly progressive high school environment, I don't think I'd even teach excerpts from this memoir to entire classrooms. I'm going to continue to wrestle with this book. I'll keep you posted on my blog.
Highly Recommended! (having said that -- it's a commitment, 300+ pp. and emotionally wrings you out to dry. Haha. Dry . . . )
And that's what Miss Martha Says.
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4 comments:
This is a very well-written account of your book. I especially like the way you lay it all on the table for potential readers and it does look like it would be a difficult book to work into a classroom setting. That brings up the topic we talked about in Issues and Principles as to where the line is for us between teachers and counselors, or at least individuals who want to prepare young people for life outside the classroom, too. It's impossible to stay out of those issues completely and the more we can tackle them through literature like this, the better, I think! I love what you said about parents preferring their students to drink as opposed to doing other drugs. I was horrified by the number of my friends whose parents not only turned a blind eye to binge drinking, but often facilitated it - in JUNIOR HIGH! I'm sorry to be conservative on this, but seventh grade is too early to be drinking. Period. (Some might call that one of your famous generalizations!) The fact is, though, that girls start participating in these activities before they are old enough or mature enough to understand what they are doing and where those choices that seem so minor at the time can land them down the road. Wow - this has been an extra long comment - I sort of stumbled onto a soapbox!
Martha,
I also responded to Elizabeth’s blog on this book. Her response to Smashed was quite different that yours. While I tend to agree with her that I don’t need to read the entire depressing tail to get the point; I agree with you that one must be very careful when recommending this book because of the controversial content. I particularly appreciated your insight on how parents would frown on their children learning drinking games from their schoolwork.
Deanna
I meant tale. I really need to read these blogs before publishing them.
Deanna,
Thank you for responding to my blog, too. I read Elizabeth's blog earlier this evening, and posted a response as well. It seems to me that, regardless of the title or author, our conversations in class and on-line always come back to: Do we want to open a Pandora's box in our English/Language Arts classroom? And if we do, then how are we going to justify that choice to our administrators and the greater learning community at large? What are some of the reactions we should anticipate from our students' reading of a controversial book? Can we name specific strategies that we will employ as teachers, when we are faced with (anticipated and unanticipated) dramatic reactions from students and our learning community at large? These are interesting, challenging, exciting questions. I continue to thoroughly enjoy our spicy debates!! -- Miss Martha
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