Blotto Tales of Manhattan

The New York Observer, January 23rd, 2005

"It seems to me that young girl memoirs get a bad rap," said Koren Zailckas, age 24. The waifish author of Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, which will be published by Viking in February, was sitting quietly at Mama's, a comfort-food restaurant near her apartment in Alphabet City. (Mama's also pops up on Ms. Zailckas' Web site, korenzailckas.com, in the section entitled "Koren's Booze-Free Guide to the East Village.") "I think, with young girl writers, people do wonder what gives you the right to write about your life when you haven't lived that much. But I think that the experience of being a young person in America is a valid one."Smashed is mostly about Ms. Zailckas' alcohol consumption, which began at age 14 and continued in earnest at Syracuse University, where she was known to drink rum by the bottle, vomit often and wake up in strange places. Then, after graduating and moving to New York City, and following a painful evolution from drinking Blue Smurfs to straight martinis, Ms. Zailckas quit booze altogether at the tender age of 23. Yet the author is not, she writes in her introduction, an alcoholic. Ms. Zailckas-cue parental hysteria!-was a "binge drinker."

It makes Smashed a curious kind of book: an addiction memoir without the addiction. In fact, one of the most striking things about Ms. Zailckas is that her life experience to date sounds rather unremarkable. Who didn't get wasted in college? (Or perhaps more specifically: Who didn't get wasted at Syracuse?) Ms. Zailckas, who can reel off national statistics on youth and alcohol consumption on demand, seems to recognize the marketing potential of her Everylush story.

"I'm not trying to say I'm exceptional in any way, you know?" she said, looking very bohemian-ingénue with her long brown hair, huge eyes and pale skin, and wearing jeans, a black hooded sweatshirt and a shrunken camel trench coat. (Her appearance struck a marked contrast to the cheerleading sorority-girl protagonist of her memoir.) "I think anyone could have written this book. I think everyone's experienced a lot of the same things that I have."

The memoir that "anyone could have written," like the "show about nothing," might be an inevitable frontier of confessional lit. After all, not every aspiring writer has had sex with her father, turned tricks, sniffed glue, popped pills or become homeless. In this regard, and given that Ms. Zailckas is a young writer with talent, an "issues memoir" about a non-issue might become a sexy commodity. According to the author, Viking paid the then-unpublished 23-year-old an advance of $150,000.

"It wasn't that I had gone for years and years thinking that I was going to write a book, or that I was going to write something like this," said Ms. Zailckas. "It was once I started examining different episodes and events, through college and through high school, I realized: 'Oh my God, like, alcohol is really an intrinsic part of everything that I was going through.' I mean, overarching themes didn't occur to me until I was all done writing Smashed. Alcohol was preventing me from developing as a person! I never dealt with my shyness, or I never realized that my friendships were just crap without Amstel Light, you know? Or that I was scared to death of intimacy. Things like that."

While at Syracuse, she had studied poetry with Mary Karr, author of the best-selling memoir The Liars' Club. Ms. Karr took Ms. Zailckas on as a sort of protégé, hiring her to baby-sit her kids and suggesting memoirs to read, such as Frank Conroy's Stop-Time and Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, which Ms. Zailckas mentioned as important influences. In her acknowledgments, she calls Mary Karr a "goddess."

"She was probably the first person who made me interested in memoirs," said Ms. Zailckas. "And I always thought they're such valuable perspectives, you know? To read about someone's real life. So it was important for me not to write Smashed as, like, a thinly guised novel, because in some ways I think that would say this is something to be ashamed of."

"I thought it was amazing," said Ms. Karr of Smashed. "I think that what's going to make a good memoir is the writing. I think to be human is to be complicated and horrible and remarkable. It's not about who's had the biggest butt-whipping. And maybe the fact that she does treat it more like an issues book is a compensation for that-for not being older."

Ms. Karr also expressed admiration for Ms. Zailckas' gumption in securing the attention of the publishing industry.

"I had no idea she had a contract! She's not somebody to ask for help. She's very independent," said Ms. Karr. "It's not like I made this happen-I knew nothing about it. She came here at 22 and did this solely on her own. Everybody's going to think it's my publisher and blah, blah, blah ... it's not what happened, I swear."

The seed of the book was planted in 2002, when some Time magazine reporters visited the Syracuse campus to research a story on girls and alcohol abuse. Ms. Zailckas understood the subject well.

To hear her tell it, the rest was as easy as slipping into warm bath water. After graduating in 2002, she moved to the Upper East Side and later into a studio on Avenue A. She took a job as an advertising assistant at Men's Journal and unsuccessfully pitched stories. She started writing her memoir and sent letters to agents. Erin Hosier of the Gernert Company "just got it" and requested 50 more pages to read. A proposal was ready in January 2003, and Molly Stern at Viking-the first editor they met with-bought the book the same month. A few weeks later, Ms. Zailckas quit her Men's Journal gig and spent the next nine months writing in her apartment.

"I remember reading the proposal, and it was just a very broad outline about the idea about girls and binge drinking," said Ms. Stern, of Viking. "I remember sitting up on my couch, and I remember just being stunned by her voice."

Viking wouldn't disclose the exact print run, but Ms. Stern said that it would be just under 50,000 copies-an expression of confidence in a first book-and that they'd already been back to press once, before the book was even out. Publishers Weekly gave Smashed a starred review, Ms. Zailckas is scheduled to appear on CNN and has been chosen by Barnes and Noble for its "Discover Great New Writers" list. David Jernigan of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth helped send copies to all the members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

"It's funny-I compare her book to some of the contemporary classics, such as Jarhead," said Ms. Stern, referring to Anthony Swofford's gritty chronicle of the Gulf War, which Ms. Stern had tried unsuccessfully to acquire. "Lucy Grealy did the same thing in Autobiography of a Face. There was humor, and there was pain. I could be a little crazy-editor-obsessed-with-her-book, but I think [ Smashed] is really in that league."

Another Smashed enthusiast is the conservative New York Times columnist William Safire, who included the title in his Dec. 29, 2004, "Office Pool" column as a potential 2005 "sleeper nonfiction best-seller."

In Smashed, Ms. Zailckas describes her drinking moments in supreme detail: "One gulp of the plum-colored stuff kindles my tonsils, starting a fire that knocks down my esophagus like a trail of dominoes." She creates vivid scenes of college life-of pawing frat boys and weeping sorority girls-that would surely fascinate anyone with a teenager. The kids who appear are usually miserable and angry; Ms. Zailckas spends a surreal period living in a sorority house that sounds like a cross between a fun house and an insane asylum. She burns through a number of tragic female companions-the girls who were always crying irrationally at parties and burning their arms with cigarettes-and learns lessons: "After Skip, I've decided that fraternities and the boys in them are hazards," she writes.

Ms. Zailckas says there is more material to plumb in the depths of her emotional life, although her upbringing was "ridiculously middle-of-the-road, middle-class Americana." It passed mostly in Bolton, near Boston, Mass., with her younger sister and parents. Ms. Zailckas' dad "was working at all kinds of software companies and technological companies, esoteric jobs that I couldn't even explain if I wanted to." Her mom was stay-at-home for many years, but now designs department-store window displays.

"I do at this point think that I want to keep writing nonfiction. I believe in memoirs and I believe they're necessary, you know?" said Ms. Zailckas, adding that she's not yet sure if her next project will be a book. "I am sort of interested in going further back into childhood and those teenage years. Once I scratched the surface and realized that alcohol was sort of covering up all this other crap that I hadn't thought about yet-like the way that I deal with men and the way that I deal with women-I sort of want to dive deeper into that, you know. And all the expectations that come with being a girl and a woman.

"There's this overwhelming idea that art and writing are something you're supposed to elevate yourself up to; you have to experience these huge things," Ms. Zailckas continued. "And I just think it's all around us, and I think being a young person is meaningful and I think our everyday experiences are meaningful, and I don't think we have to go out and look for them. I don't think necessarily that this stuff I'm experiencing every day at 24 is any less meaningful than the stuff I'll be experiencing when I'm 40."