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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Twenty-four-year-old memoirist Koren Zailckas goes beyond blackouts and hangovers to examine the emotional costs of binge drinking for young women.
Jan 31, 2005 | "It's hard to be a gal with a book in this town," says first-time memoirist Koren Zailckas, smiling quickly before looking down at her tea latte with the intensity of someone divining her future in its frothy dregs. When I nudge her to expand on this claim, she blurts out, "No one gets their panties in a twist when Brad Land writes a memoir!"
Zailckas' book, "Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood," will not be published until Feb. 7. But already, she's inhaled a strong whiff of schadenfreude. Twenty-four years old, Zailckas has been out of college for just two and a half years, and labored only briefly in the journalism salt mines -- as an advertising assistant at Men's Journal -- before scoring a $150,000 contract from Viking to write about her life as a hard-drinking Massachusetts teenager and Syracuse University student.
The book is getting the hard sell from its publisher, with a six-city tour -- extremely unusual for a first-time author -- and a trip back to the presses even before publication. Zailckas' editor, Molly Stern, says that Viking printed "hundreds" of extra galleys, sending them to journalists, clinicians, politicians and anyone else who might respond to the alarm she's raising about the hard-partying ways of the nation's young women.
After early starred reviews in Kirkus and Publisher's Weekly (and anticipated reviews in People and USA Today), reporters are eager to talk to this teeny-tiny girl, dressed today in a black T-shirt, sneakers and jeans with cuffs wet from walking through the post-blizzard slush from her nearby East Village apartment. But interest does not always equal adoration. There's already been some sniffy commentary from New York media circles about Zailckas' age. The genre of female memoir, according to a recent New York Post article, "is on the verge of being inundated with confessional memoirs by girls whose main qualification is merely their extreme youth."
But, ironically, what may burn the throats of Zailckas' peers most is the ordinariness of her tale. A reader could easily close the book and say, "That was her big drunken girlhood? I got drunker than her! Where's my book deal?" Many of us have, in fact, been drunker than Zailckas, who quaffed her first tumbler of Southern Comfort with a bad-influence friend at 14. She also had her stomach pumped at 16, an admittedly dramatic turn of events, though not the result of a careening night of Hiltonesque table-dancing, but of naiveté about the time lapse between sip and buzz.
According to Zailckas, this memoir is not supposed to be one of those action-packed chronicles of dissipated wastrels and their coke-and-Prozac antics. "This is not the story of me being bad for badness' sake," she says. "I wanted to use my experience to make sense of the phenomenon of young girls pickling themselves." Indeed, deploying a potent concoction of anger, research and energy for self-investigation, Zailckas' aim is to answer the question of why many young women are unhappy. That answer, she feels, is The Drink.
