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Smashed: Story of
a Drunken Girlhood
By Koren Zailckas
$21.95
Viking Penguin |
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A sobering look at binge drinking
In Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, first-time author
Koren Zailckas recounts her love affair with booze, from her first
taste of alcohol at 13 through high school and college, where alcohol
was used as a mechanism for bonding with other girls, a rallying
cry and an escape from shyness.
Alcohol is there when she and her best friend sneak out to go drink
on the beach and meet college guys. . . . Its scent seeps from the
walls and carpets of the sorority house she lives in during college,
and alcohol is there when she “misplaces” her virginity
one night at a frat party. . . . But she’s not an alcoholic.
This is, Zailckas says, just what young girls in America do.
A student at Syracuse University, which was the subject of a
Time magazine article about young women and binge drinking,
Zailckas examines the culture of drinking that dominated her adolescence
and that of so many girls just like her.
Smashed identifies one of the most perilous trends among
young females: from age 13 to their 20s, most girls are on a slippery
slope to becoming binge drinkers.
As the topic of binge drinking continues to make headlines, Smashed
is a valuable resource for parents, teachers and mentors of teens
as well as anyone interested in how drinking has defined modern
America’s coming-of-age story. |
