Smashed by Koren Zailckas

Summary:
This book is a memoir of Koren's 'drunken girlhood'. It tells of her first drink, her first time drunk, and many other times drinking has brought her. She doesn't leave out the embarrassing details to glorify herself and drinking, she tells it the way it happened.

Review:
I thought the book was very good. Some parts were funny, the way she describes people or the situations. Some parts were also a little frightening, when she writes about the time she had to have her stomach pumped.

Quote:
"Of course, Coors isn't crank or coke or crack. And Heineken isn't heroin. And vodka isn't Valium." I thought this was a really good quote, because Koren makes it out that because alcohol isn't these other drugs, it's okay to have. It's not as bad as these other things.

Summary:
It’s Zailckas’s real life story about her battle with binge drinking. She takes her first sip at 14, and doesn’t stop until a decade later at 24. After countless nights she can’t remember, brushes with date rape, being in a coma, and having her stomach pumped, she finally gives up the thing that’s taken over her life. She learns so much from it, but she’s wasted ten years of her life being under the influence.

Review:
I really liked this book because it was real. I could relate to it a lot, in some ways myself personally, and in other ways I definitely read things that sounded exactly like friends of mine. She doesn’t sugarcoat any part of the story, and it’s a real wake up call for anyone who’s unaware of the consequences of becoming out of control. It’s a scary, but necessary concept that I think this book covers very well.

Quote:
“To this day, I can’t remember when I had my first kiss. I can’t tell you how old I was, if it was a moment in Mav, if I closed my eyes or left them open. The memory is long gone. My mind tossed it out with the bathwater of experience, with TV and takeout and chitchat, the brief intervals of time that simply never soaked in. That kiss, though historical, was in no way historic. It was a tree that fell in the forest. And I didn’t make a sound.”I picked this quote because it’s the first few lines of the book, and it’s relevant because it’s just one of the many things she doesn’t remember because she was “smashed” for so much of her life.