Molly Finkelstein Backpage Editor

Have you ever gotten drunk? If you’re a college student, which the majority of us here at Vassar are, the answer is most likely yes. Apparently that makes you worthy of writing a book and actually getting people to buy it. The book Smashed by Koren Zailckas—a pretty Syracuse University grad in her mid-twenties—is an autobiographical account of getting drunk.

I’ve never been a fan of frat-boy-esque stories that begin with the ubiquitous phrase, “I was so wasted last night” and then continue on with a story about a) hooking up with someone, b) vomiting, or c) looking like an asshole. If, perhaps, you enjoy those stories, great, here’s a whole book about throwing up and blacking out, with a side of sex.

The book starts off at the beginning of Zailckas’ drinking career. She and her friend get their hands on a bottle of Southern Comfort at age 14 and so she starts to drink. Between then and college, she gets her stomach pumped, loses the trust of her parents, and realizes that drinking is the answer to her low self-esteem problem. At this point, I just wanted to smack her for being an idiot.

Maybe it’s just me, but if all these things had happened to me, I think I would have learned my lesson, or at least my drinking limits. The majority of this book is just the pathetic story of a girl who didn’t know how many shots of bad liquor would make her grab hold of the porcelain throne.

When Zalickas gets to college, her drinking becomes more serious—she gets completely intoxicated every weekend.

Getting involved in the Greek scene at Syracuse doesn’t really help her drinking problem. It’s a wonder she remembers enough of any story to put it in her book. Most of her stories aren’t even that interesting. Although, I was appropriately horrified when she couldn’t remember if she was raped. Other than that, she goes through a series of boyfriends, friends, and choices of drinks. It’s fairly dull stuff. I have friends who could write a more interesting book with their drinking stories. I mean, I’m sorry Zailckas had low self-esteem, but her story isn’t different enough from everyone else’s to be worth telling. (Don’t worry, she won’t kill herself because of a harsh review, she doesn’t have self-esteem problems anymore).

The point at which her story becomes a bit different is when she graduates from college. She continues drinking herself into unconsciousness every weekend through several years of post-graduation. Blacking out on the streets of New York City is just a tad more dangerous than blacking out on an isolated, upstate university campus.

At this point, she finally realizes she has a drinking problem when, after all these years of drunken exploits, she wakes up in a stranger’s apartment overlooking Central Park. For her, this is the final straw. I have no idea why it was this and not the time she got her stomach pumped in high school or the time she accidentally lost her virginity while blacked out or even just the fact that she can’t remember her first kiss that signaled her drinking had gone too far.

The ending to her story is perhaps even more mundane and cliché than the beginning. She falls in love with a man who makes her want to stop drinking. She says that she’s “had it with a world that has created a generation of women who are emotionally dependent on alcohol, and then demonizes us for our lack of feminine control.” Then she quotes a Sylvia Plath poem (which she does throughout the book). Excuse me while I vomit, and not because I’m “smashed,” but because this is probably the lamest ending this book could have. I’d almost rather if she had jumped off the Empire State Building in a drunken rage.

It’s interesting to point out that throughout the book, and even in an interview I saw with her on “The View,” she maintains that she was never an alcoholic. Someone forgot to tell Star Jones that, because underneath her name on “The View,” it alternated “best-selling new author” with “was a teenage alcoholic.” Maybe the book would have been more interesting if she was a real alcoholic and not just a lame teenager who drank too much and then got a boyfriend.

This book mainly serves to scare parents. Smashed was on The New York Times’ Hardcover Nonfiction Best-Seller list, proving that it appeals to at least someone. My guess is that the reason it even got published was because some middle-aged publisher had a teenage daughter, read this book, and became terrified that she was drinking. It’s gotten decent reviews from most major publications, but that’s only because they were reviews by clueless, middle-aged professionals. As a college student, I think her story is too common to be considered interesting.