Sobering reality for a material girl
Be careful what you ask for, indeed: Increasingly sophisticated brain-scan technology has helped us figure out why teens take death-defying chances -- with drugs, with alcohol, with cars, with sex -- and the answer is as scary as what they’re doing. They skate to the edge of safety because the part of their brains that exercises judgment doesn’t develop as fast as the part that craves adventure. Loosely put, they don’t understand that what they’re doing can hurt them.
Koren Zailckas, the 24-year-old author of “Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood,” certainly didn’t get it when she started drinking at 14. She didn’t get it for a soused near-decade, as she logged enough lost weekends -- and weeknights, for that matter -- to qualify her for a gold medal in the too-young-to-vote alcoholism Olympics. We’re not talking the occasional aspirin-responsive hangover here. This girl threw up, blacked out, then did it again. Her life before drinking sounds no worse than most in terms of alienation and insecurities, but she responded to it with a sustained attempt to destroy herself.
Zailckas gives us every pickled detail, not because she sees coming clean as part of the recovery process but because she wants us to understand that she was once at the vanguard of a social movement -- the drive among adolescents to drink themselves into oblivion.
Of all the self-destructive things teens can do, abusing alcohol does seem to be the most popular. Drug use is down over the last decade, and, despite the rumors, the incidence of sexual intercourse is down too. According to a government study, about 18% of adolescents between 12 and 17 drink, a percentage the report’s authors regard as “unacceptably high.” (Hypocrites take note: About half of all adults say they drink, in case you wonder where the modeling behavior comes from.)
And Zailckas holds the dubious distinction of belonging to a vulnerable cohort: white middle- and upper-middle-class kids, and Catholic to boot, which, according to the research she relies on, increases the risk. She grew up in a Boston suburb that is “rural and secluded, the type of place where you can live seven years and never catch a glimpse of your neighbors.” That’s well-to-do acreage, all right -- and the houses she did see often came equipped with absent parents and nicely stocked liquor cabinets.
Her stated intention in this, her first book, is “to show the full life cycle of alcohol abuse,” to describe what she says are “ordinary experiences among girls and young women in both the United States and abroad.” To infuse her story with a gravitas that makes a trend out of a memoir, however, she makes some questionable leaps in logic. She says alcohol robbed her of “so much of the equipment that adults should have.” She cites as evidence of her arrested development a physical childishness that makes strangers mistake her for a kid: “[T]he clerk behind the counter calls me miss instead of ma’am, telemarketers still ask to speak to my parents, and after years of financial independence, every handyman who turns up at my apartment still makes a snide remark about ‘Daddy paying my rent.’ ”
Ah, but any woman over 30 knows that ma’am doesn’t kick in until then, at the earliest, and anyone who has ever heard Broadway and now “West Wing” actress Kristin Chenoweth speak knows that vocal tone has nothing to do with age. As for people in their 20s who still depend on their parents, there are enough of them to spawn a rash of social trend stories in magazines. Assumptions about Zailckas’ obvious dependency say more about grown children who live off their parents than about her damaged state. Alcohol didn’t make her who she is; who she is made her turn to alcohol.
She also extrapolates from her own teen identity -- “shamed, self-conscious, and small,” battered by a society that makes it hard to be a girl -- to her peers in general. But wait a minute. Some girls who live in the same material world as Zailckas don’t turn to drink. In fact, more than 80% of 12- to 17-year-olds don’t, or they don’t drink often enough to call it a habit, according to the study she cites. Something else is going on here -- and the glancing references the author makes to her parents’ behavior don’t seem a sufficient explanation, nor do the references to media, to advertising, to other external influences. She gets the details of her drinking right, down to the specifics of ingredients, containers and the weather when she goes outside to get sick. But she skirts the edges of the really ugly stuff.
Perhaps the most interesting evasive action in “Smashed” is Zailckas’ adamant denial that she was -- is -- an alcoholic. She certainly has booze on the brain. She describes herself in her early days of sobriety as “a starving woman on a diet: I make mental notes of what’s in everyone’s glass.” She admits to making sure an online addiction counselor is in another time zone before she sends in her evaluation form, because she doesn’t “want to risk the prospect of an in-person evaluation.” She prides herself on stopping drinking before alcoholism falls on her “like an ax,” as though her nearly 10-year bender were just a semipro spree.
Why is the terminology so important to her? As someone who’s metabolically challenged when it comes to alcohol, constitutionally unable to get to the end of a second glass of wine with dinner, I turned to a friend who has known her share of serious drinkers. She smiled, from the vantage point of decades. The more a serious drinker denies that she is an alcoholic, my friend said, the likelier it is that the label applies.
In other words: If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. Zailckas is just too close to see it for what it is. She has spent the bulk of her post-pubescent life hammered, having embraced sobriety only recently. Some large part of her energy goes, understandably, toward not slipping back over the nearby precipice; to keep herself planted on solid ground, she has to convince herself that the cliff is only a small hill.
It’s a shame, because she has an ear for wistful, unexpected prose, a skill with rhythm and language, a journalist’s ambition to ground her story in statistics and research. I wish she’d waited a few more years before tackling this subject, waited until she’d racked up more time away from alcohol and had a better sense of what it means to be sober. “Smashed” too often feels like a travelogue, each horrific adventure tinged with a bit of gee-whiz at the thrill of it all. Like a fine wine, never Zailckas’ beverage of choice, this story would have benefited from the passage of time.
