Smashed Oral Report: Koren Zalickas\'

Smashed

Oral Report: Koren Zalickas' Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

Everyone in this room knows someone like Koren Zalickas the author of Smashed, or at least someone very much like the author. She's pretty and popular, but she doesn't see herself as pretty. Instead, she thinks people like her because she's the best friend of pretty and popular girls. Everyone likes her, but she thinks it's just because she knows where the best parties are, and where it's easy to get the best booze. And maybe she has a boyfriend, but deep down inside she suspects he just likes her because of the fact that drinking makes her seem fun, not because he really cares.

The subtitle of Koren Zalickas' memoir is Story of a Drunken Girlhood. Like many girls of her generation, Zalickas began drinking long before she was twenty-one. Zalickas spent her sweet sixteen celebration not behind the wheel of a shiny new car but by getting her stomach pumped. She can't remember much of the night, but she calculates that at 5'2 and 105 pounds, it would take about an hour of downing 7-10 drinks to kill someone of her size, and she was easily drinking more than that at the beginning of the evening (95).

By 16, Koren was a pro. Even as a child she says she learned that alcohol "steadies strained social conventions," as a potential BFF named Natalie offered her a first taste of one of the leftovers from her parent's cocktail party (13). Koren wanted to seem cool, so she took a swing. Koren was thirteen, a full year older than the average of thirteen, the age when most girls have the first drink (4).

All of this may make Koren seem like a classic burnout teen alcoholic, a cautionary tale. But she wasn't. What's so striking about all of her stories is how normal her suburban girlhood was from the outside. She might have drunk more than some of her friends, but they all drank with her, and many of their social lives revolved around drinking. Koren was an honors student, and became an undergraduate at the prestigious Syracuse University. Syracuse is a school known for its competitive academics and high rate of underage drinking. Syracuse promises a "total college experience" for students. It has rousing basketball games, snowy hills, and signs all over the dorms that tell students not to binge drink. But when Koren joined a sorority, partying hard after working hard became to seem natural. Koren was the type of girl who would be ahead in her reading, just so she wouldn't feel bad about having a forgotten weekend, as she partied on, desperately looking for a friend and for a guy to find her attractive.

Much of Koren's sexual and romantic life in college, she admits, is hidden in a drunken haze. Why else, she jokes with typical humor, are there so many cocktails with the name 'sex' in the title. Drinking lowers inhibitions, makes you feel better about yourself, makes you do things you don't really want to do. All of her drinking eventually ended up with this shy girl, too shy to even look herself in a mirror naked, blacking out after one night of drinking. She woke up, unsure of where she was and if she had sex for the first time. To this day, Koren can't remember her first kiss.