Message in a bottle.

I have to say that I'm impressed with Koren Zailckas. Not so much for the fact that she's written an engrossing memoir while only in her mid-20s, but rather for the fact that she even remembers anything of the period of which she's writing. For much of her teens and early 20s, Zailckas spent much of her time getting drunk, drunk, or recovering from binging. Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood is both the story of Zailckas' struggle with alcohol and a warning of how the dangerous drinking has become a destructive means for young women in particular to overcome feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy.

Zailckas points out early in her book that she was never an alcoholic: she never physically required the buzz from a couple of drinks. A good student from a middle class family, she turned to alcohol beginning at the age of 14 to compensate for her perceived social awkwardness. Stories of increased sexual assult and alcohol poisoning in women often appear in the news, but when Zailckas recounts (or sometimes reconstructs from recollections of more sober friends) her experience having her stomach pumped or memories of relationships that revolved around bar hours, her struggle becomes more personal, or in some cases, familiar. Occassionally Zailckas uses grandiloquent language in describing her drinking, an aspect that I found rather annoying, but when she reins in her language, the reality of her experience comes through strongest.

There are several points at which Zailckas makes attempts to curtail her drinking, but when she falls off the wagon she is frank in pointing out her own poor choices. But she also reveals the pervasiveness of alcohol in society and the often contradictory stances toward what is, at its root, a drug. There's a sense of struggle in Zailckas' writing, that the craving for the courage offered by a drink will be something that may never leave her. Her story isn't likely to leave her readers.