I just read this book Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood by Koren Zailckas. See a great interview/review here.
Zailckas describes how she began drinking when she was 14 and quickly fell into a pattern of alcohol abuse. She writes about how drinking framed her days, her relationships, her selfhood. Interweaving her story with a few footnotes that reports statistics, she is expressing anger at a society (parents, friends, her University, and others) where the approach to women drinking is summarized as okay as long as it stays “Out of sight, out of mind. That is to say, as long as we keep our drinking out of sight, the administration won’t mind if we do it” (pg. 115).
I must admit, I have little experience with the kind of drinking she is talking about. I don’t drink frequently and never have. What struck the biggest cord in me is her description of how women feel responsible for their women friends who are drinking. Making sure that they aren’t being taken advantage of, making sure they get home, that they don’t pass out and die, and that a man doesn’t take advantage of them. I did have my fair share of those experiences. I remember one night in particular where I was up until 4 a.m., having tucked two drunken roommates (one had gone home with her boyfriend) into bed and staying up to clean puke off the carpet and walls of our campus apartment. Quite inexplicably, I was a member of a sorority (made more inexplicable if you know me), and I frequently had to enforce the drinking rules of our sorority and policing who got into whose car, monitoring who could drive or not (mostly not — one sip and no sister was allowed to get in that person’s car — and believe you me, I was targeted for a lot of hate over that rule, not that I bended on it).
Mostly, for me, this books was a look into how other people may have lived. As a social psychologist, I was fascinated by the narrative of identities that this book wove. One of my favorite lines of the entire book was after her first drink where she is describing being slightly inebriated in the backseat of her friend’s mother’s car. This mother looked at Koren through the review mirror, and Koren responds in this way:
She doesn’t know that the thing I found in her liquor cabinet has given me the capacity to be a completely different animal on the inside. Inside, I feel exotic and dangerous. I’m a cobra inside a kitty cat (p. 25).
The early narrative is one of alcohol allowing Koren to act in ways that are more authentic, less trapped by low self-worth, fear of ugliness, an obsessive compulsive tendency to question and re-question every word you spoke before those words come out. Later, it becomes a lubricant she needs in order to experience any kind of intimacy — not with just males, but for friendships with females as well. When sober she justifies drinking because she knows, underneath her skin, she’s damaged — hideous.
But the narrative of identities is not so straight forward as this. She writes about how she forces herself, when drinking, to be brighter, more entertaining, just more. And then she wonders how this has irrevocably changed her personality. (Ossification, anyone?). She writes about how drinking made her angry, or perhaps revealed her anger.
She begins(and ends) the book by writing about how alcohol stunted her development. That learning how to trust her own voice, her ability to have intimate conversations, was always dependent upon alcohol in her system. She argues that if she had not drunk so early, so often, and formed a mode of self presentation based on alcohol, that she would be able to be intimate without it. Personally, this is one of her arguments I found both interesting and probably not true. While she defined her ability to do this in terms of having alcohol in her system, most likely true for her, I do not know if NOT drinking would have enabled her to “mature normally.” As a 30-year-old who did not rely on alcohol to cope, I do not feel any further ahead in these areas as she is herself. And I know that I could not as thoughtfully analyze my own existence as she does at the age of 24 (I couldn’t even do it at the age I’m at).
Underlying her entire story is the danger of men. How men can take and take from women. Fear of date rape. Fear of male mistreatment. How alcohol made her more able to deal with (and put men in their place) leers and comments. So alcohol appears to both have made her believe herself stronger — but also made her a victim. She writes about how she possibly lost her virginity to a frat boy she didn’t even like when she was 19 — waking up from a black out naked in his room. Later, she writes about being at a sorority formal where a staff member at the hotel would not let go of her and stalked her to her room when she did manage to get away. The narrative here is also complex. It’s a mixture of self-blaming, the acknowledgment that other women feel a need to be responsible for one another, and anger at a society that blames the woman for being in these situations rather than blaming men who rape.
All in all, very complex and great read. I’d be interested in whether any of you had read it and your thoughts on it. I’m particularly interested in how you think she discusses males in the book.
