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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
"Smashed" is both literary memoir and polemic on young women and binge drinking, a mix that at times reads like a well-crafted term paper. Zailckas obediently footnotes statistics about the percentage of eighth graders who have tried alcohol and the mean age for first drinks, but also dots her text with references to Rilke and Plath. By the time she begins a sentence "In her essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,' Laura Mulvey suggests that films and the sexy starlets in them give our dirty thoughts free rein ..." I have to put the book down, because I'm pretty sure that sometime not so long ago, I wrote exactly the same sentence.
When Zailckas writes about seeing girls with beers in Central Park, "I catch a glimpse of what I looked like ten years ago, and I have to look away," she speaks directly to what was painful -- and a little aggravating -- about reading "Smashed." Zailckas is using the matrix of binge drinking, her poetry, academics -- Laura Mulvey! -- to impose order on confusions and fears of young womanhood, and reading it is enough to make any of us who spent years trying to do exactly the same thing -- or, honestly, still do -- suddenly feel like we've taken off all our clothes. She reminds me so much of my younger self that I want to scream at her, and at College Me: It's not just the booze, you silly girl! And it's not just "the gaze"! Anger fades, irony sets in! Don't be naive!
I ask Zailckas if -- a year after finishing this manuscript -- she is already dying to move on, whether she burns with shame when she thinks that part of the book's conceit might already bear the stain of youthful thinking. But she stands by her convictions, which have clearly been preserved partly by her ire at the alcohol industry and university structures reluctant to deal with the dangers of bingeing. In response to a question about what makes her angriest, Zailckas sends me a post-interview e-mail (sweetly signed "Love, Koren Z.") in which she writes, "It's ignorance (more accurately indifference) in the face of obvious suffering." Over tea, she spits out percentages about depression and date rape, about how booze is sold more aggressively to minors than to adults. She brims with fury about Samantha Spady, a drunken 19-year-old Colorado student stashed by her friends in a frat storage room and found there 13 hours later, dead. Five students, including Spady, died in September alone from alcohol-related injuries, she tells me. And a 20-year-old British woman recently became the youngest ever to receive a liver transplant, after years of teenage tippling led to cirrhosis.
Of course, "Smashed" doesn't include transplants or death. But there are some seriously scary close calls: a bad night on the Jersey shore in high school when she loses her girlfriend and later finds her in a beach house with strange men, covered in vomit and dressed in an entirely new set of clothes. Or when Zailckas herself, who assiduously protects her virginity into her junior year, wakes up naked in a frat boy's bed, with no idea of whether she has had sex for the first time or not. They're not tales likely to send shivers of surprise down the spines of most college-aged Americans, though that in itself is perhaps troubling.
Zailckas admits that if booze hadn't been her poison, she could well have whiled away her coltish years cutting or starving herself. She can't put her finger on how hours spent rolling kegs into woods would have been put to better use had she been a teetotaler. But Zailckas still cleaves to the belief that had she not stepped from sobriety's path so early, she would be a better-formed adult today.
She writes in her present, sober voice, "Nine years after I took my first drink, it occurs to me that I haven't grown up ... I should be able to hear my own unwavering voice rise in public without feeling my heart flutter like it's trying to take flight ... I should be able to stop self-censoring and smile when I feel like it. I should recognize happiness when I feel it expand in my gut." About Matt, whom she dates long-distance for a year, she writes: "Another girl might have learned to do this in high school: roosting on the kitchen counter or the fire escape with the phone cradled against one shoulder, soaking up stories, and learning that not all silences are bad."
Well, not necessarily. And if another girl had learned how to roost and cradle, she might not have learned how to write a delicate chronicle of her experiences. It is wishful thinking that one wrong turn or bad habit can keep us from being the self-confident, sexually mature, productive young women we believe we could have been. I don't think that too many screwdrivers are too blame for Zailckas' inability to maintain a steady voice or recognize her own happiness.
But in her tale there lies a larger pattern. Throughout "Smashed," Zailckas periodically lays off the hooch, then starts drinking again. It's a favorite syndrome for women. We quit eating, quit drinking, quit smoking. We quit talking to toxic friends, quit being sluts, quit being prudes. There is power in self-abnegation, deprivation, in foot-stamping "Nos!" But we're always falling off our wagons: drinking too much and loving immoderately, handing control to people and substances that make us feel bad about ourselves, until once again, we clamp down and punish ourselves for having given in. It's a cycle that marks and damages almost all of us, whatever our chosen poison.
Booze happens to be the skeleton on which Zailckas has hung her narrative. She insists it wasn't just a convenient way to sell her book, and I believe her. But if you boiled the alcohol off of "Smashed," you would have a story of a girl struggling with the fact that she feels terrible about herself and her place in the world. The oldest story there is.
