Koren Zailckas, The Author Of Smashed Story Of A Drunken

Koren Zailckas, the author of Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (2005), is a 37 year-old Caucasian female who was born to a Catholic, middle-class family in 1980 (Zailckas, 2005, p. xiii). Zailckas grew up on the Northeast side of the United States with her mother, father, and sister who is five years younger than her—none of whom, according to her, have a history of alcoholism (p. xiv). Zailckas, however, recounts starting to drink as early as the age of fourteen and continuing to do so throughout high school (p. 4). The primary events of Smashed occur during Zailckas’s undergraduate years at Syracuse University in New York, where she was a member of the Zeta Alpha Sigma sorority (p. 142). Currently, Zailckas resides in New York, with†¦show more content†¦287). Zailckas describes drinking more than she intended when she â€Å"can’t work out how much [she has] tossed back. [She] can’t even pin it to a crude estimate† (Zailckas, 2005, p. 174). Often proclaiming that getting drunk is her objective, Zailckas has evidently exceeded her intended amount in this moment as she can’t even recall how much she consumed. For a period of time, Zailckas desired to reduce her intake, â€Å"[expecting herself] to be able to limit [her] drinking to just a few nights a week,† however, once the campus bar owners designated nights for seniors, she abandoned her plan and returned to visiting campus bars nearly every other day, illustrating her lack of control to cut back (p. 281). It is slightly difficult to evaluate if Zailckas spends excessive time obtaining, using, or recovering from alcohol. Nevertheless, she divulges her drinking routine â€Å"whereby afternoon classes will unroll into evenings of swilling cups†¦ The n evenings will unroll into mornings, to ear ringing, nausea, and hard-sleeping afternoons† implying that drinking constitutes the majority of her days (p. 120). In addition, Zailckas reports her insatiable yearnings for liquor, often analogizing it to a loved one. She says, â€Å"I feel despair... Without a bottle to hold, I feel incomplete†¦ A drink is my beloved. Without it, I am