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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
In "Smashed," Zailckas' start-and-stop boozing from 14 to 22 binds her to other hard-partying women and then drives her away from them. It edges her closer to social ease and then leaves her humiliated. It brings fraternity boys into her life and then makes her hate them. The costs of her binge drinking include weight fluctuation, mistreatment at the hands of men, a feeling that something inside of her is broken, a lack of intellectual confidence, the loss of her place on the college cheerleading squad, a lot of ralphing in bushes, some epic hangovers, and a post-college New York morning on which she doesn't know whose futon she's awakened on.
The temptation while reading her book is to shrug and say, "Welcome to the world, honey." Zailckas is up on me by one pumped stomach, but I think I can take her in the drunken felony department (pouring a bottle of Southern Comfort into the frozen yogurt machine at the ice-cream parlor where I worked in high school, and then serving it to kids). Neither of us has had any headline-news trauma: no death or grievous injury, no falls from buildings or car crashes.
Zailckas says she is not an alcoholic, she is an alcohol abuser. In other words: She's inflicted lasting damage on herself by drinking, but she's not an addict. She has not had a drink in a year and a half, and claims she's not tempted to do so, though she admits that abstinence might not "make sense in 10 or 15 years." In her time on the wagon, she says, she has begun to get over her shyness without the help of social lubricant. Her friendships are "more authentic now." She has a more comfortable relationship with sex than she did in college, when, she writes, she didn't trust men "at all." Her current boyfriend Matt appears at the end of "Smashed," though Zailckas worries that her literary portrayal of him is "too white knight-y." "It wasn't finding a good man that stopped my drinking," she tells me emphatically. Zailckas is a feminist.
When I ask her what her current pleasurable indulgences are, Zailckas grins. She says she loves the Libertines and flew to see them perform at the Coachella music festival in California. She wears their pin on the outside of a black jacket on which she has spray-painted the words "Young and Angry" in red block letters. After thinking about her other nonalcoholic escapes for a few seconds, she offers up photography and reading. "Memoirs are like crack to me," she says casually and rattles off her favorites ("Liars Club," by her Syracuse mentor Mary Karr; "This Boy's Life," by Tobias Wolff; and "Speak, Memory," by Vladimir Nabokov) before moving on to her beloved poets (Stephen Dunn, Sharon Olds, Pablo Neruda, Robert Hass).
She may be painfully shy and, these days, have a taste for nothing stronger than chocolate mint tea. She may be self-deprecating and proud to proclaim that she has written herself as "the biggest asshole" in "Smashed," an assessment that is pretty fair. She may shyly prepare me for the fact that she is going to hug me at the end of our interview. But that "Young and Angry" jacket isn't a joke. Bitty Koren Zailckas is full of rage, and it bites through her mild good-girl aesthetic. She describes her fury as a senior journalism major, when reporters from Time arrived on campus to report on binge drinking and interviewed some of her friends. Zailckas disagreed with the article, which suggested that her female peers were getting wasted in an empowered attempt to outdo men at their own gin-soaked game.
"I thought that was so stupid," she says. She lowers her chin, twirls her straight curtain of brown hair into a rope. "I have been a ballerina, a cheerleader and a sorority girl," she says. "I was the girliest girl alive. No way was I trying to compete with men." But the Time story got her thinking about alcohol and her personal history. She moved to New York, landed at Men's Journal, and continued post-college drinking for a while. Hanging out in dive bars where bartenders tried to sell her expensive cocktails with names like "the miscarriage," she writes about an evening at an all-night diner when a manager taught her to say "I am a drunken little whore" in Portuguese. Upon waking up in a strange man's apartment with a friend, Zailckas flipped. She cut back and eventually stopped drinking, and started focusing on her writing instead. She wrote a short story about having her stomach pumped as part of a proposal for a memoir about drinking. An agent and her Viking contract followed quickly.
She's also angry as she girds herself for her debut effort's reception. We talk about a journalist who suggested on his blog that young female confessional writers including Zailckas, Abigail Vona, Melissa Panarello and Amanda Marquit engage in a "'Bad Girlz' smackdown" in which they "fight to the death, covered in mud or jello (or maybe they could all just make out)." Zailckas snorts as we discuss whether the same language would be used for her male peers. "Yeah, let's have Jonathan Safran Foer and Brad Land in boxer shorts. And they can all make out and have a big orgy," she says. But Zailckas is also pretty ticked at female journalists, who she says have asked her point-blank whether she thinks she got her book deal because she is young and pretty. Her response to me, if not to them, is, "No, I think I got this book because it's about an important issue and I'm a pretty good writer." And if people say she's too young to merit her own memoir? "I wrote it because I'm young. And it's important to have a young perspective. So fuck them."
Zailckas' writing voice is very young. While some baby memoirists (Vona, Elizabeth Wurtzel) rely on the outsize details of their travails, rather than on literary style, to power readers through their tomes, Zailckas moves her "I was soooo drunk" narrative along with prose naked in its poetic ambition and unleavened by irony or distance. "I feel like one of those ratty childhood bears that smells of spit-up and has one eye popping up," she writes. And then later, about a New York hangover, "Summer sun streams through my windows like light through a magnifying glass, and I toss and kick down the sheets, writhing like an ant doused in lighter fluid." She is deft with metaphor and dramatic buildup; but she has also faithfully recorded the ponderous whine of teenage self-examination so earnest (or petulant) that it is often painful to read. "Most days, I wish Anne Sexton were my mother," is the beginning of one chapter section. It's funny, partly because it is so ludicrously morose and wrongheaded, but also because we all probably wished something equally inane when we were teenagers.
