January 11, 2005
Contact: George Yatchisin
(805) 893-3494
e-mail: yatchisin-g@ sa.ucsb.edu
Koren Zailckas gives a free reading from her powerful new memoir Smashed—Story of a Drunken Girlhood at UCSB Campbell Hall
Summary Facts:
- Koren Zailckas
- Smashed—Story of a Drunken Girlhood
- Zailckas will read from her powerful memoir about coming of age
- Her book is an insightful look at the culture of drinking that dominates many high school and college women’s lives
- Wednesday, February 16 / 8 pm
- UCSB Campbell Hall
- Free
- Information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535
Koren Zailckas will read from her gripping and at times shocking memoir Smashed—Story of a Drunken Girlhood on Wednesday, February 16 at 8 pm at UCSB Campbell Hall. This is a free event.
From earliest experimentation to habitual excess to full-blown abuse, twenty-four-year-old Koren Zailckas leads us through her experience of a terrifying trend among young women, exploring how binge drinking becomes routine. With the stylistic freshness of a poet and the dramatic gifts of a novelist, Zailckas describes her first sip at fourteen, alcohol poisoning at sixteen, a blacked-out sexual experience at nineteen, total disorientation after waking up in an unfamiliar New York City apartment at twenty-two, when she realized she had to stop, and all the depression, rage, troubled friendships and sputtering romantic connections in between. Zailckas’s unflinching candor and exquisite analytical eye get to the meaning beneath the seeming banality of girls’ getting drunk. She persuades us that her story is the story of thousands of girls like her who are not alcoholics (yet), but who use booze as a short cut to courage, a stand-in for good judgment and a solution for shyness, each of them failing to see how their emotional distress, unarticulated hostility and depression are entangled with their socially condoned binging.
Noted memoirist and poet Mary Karr, author of The Liar’s Club and Cherry, writes, “Koren Zailckas chronicles, in details both grim and marvelous, the hair-raising drunkalogue that so many college kids go through without becoming full-fledged drunks. But the wit and insight rampant in the prose of Smashed raises the book far above the issue of young drinking. Zailckas has captured what’s unfortunately became a quintessential American girlhood.”
Combining memoir, analysis and exceptional writing, Zailckas examines the culture of drinking that dominated her adolescence and that of so many girls just like her. Written in a voice that is at once candid, unflinching and tautly poetic, Smashed identifies one of the most perilous trends among young females: from age thirteen to their twenties, most girls are on a slippery slope to becoming binge drinkers. A Harvard School of Public Health study found that 30% of high school seniors report binge drinking (defined as consuming five or more drinks in a row) and that 86% of the women who were frequent binge drinkers considered themselves to be moderate or light drinkers.
As Zailckas explains, it’s not street drugs like crack and crystal meth that parents should be worried about, it’s their liquor cabinets, wine cellars and refrigerators, where the next party is just a temptation away. The progression she sees in her life is universal, and while she may only be 24, the honesty, insight and clarity with which she writes about how drinking slowly warped her life will resonate with girls and parents in particular, and with anyone who has drawn on alcohol as more than just a beverage.
Zailckas grew up in the suburbs of Boston and attended Syracuse University. She resides in New York where she works as a journalist.
Courtesy of Borders, copies of Koren Zailckas’ book will be available for purchase and signing.
Koren Zailckas is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures with support from the Office of Student Life.
For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.
Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.