Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood By Koren Zailckas Viking, 343 pp., $21.95 Buy this book more books most popular most commented Personal Days by Elizabeth Hand The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York by Tom Robbins Welcome to New York Comic Con by Carol Cooper A Voice Poetry Roundup by Alan Gilbert Etgar Keret's Short-Story Overload by Michelle Orange Girls Love Gay Male Porn Pucker Up by Tristan Taormino My Boyfriend's Kink Is Getting Fat. What Do I Do? Savage Love by Dan Savage Sex and the City Spoilers: A Sneak Preview of What Really Happens to Carrie and the Girls by Lynn Yaeger Our Favorite Writers Pick Their Favorite Obscure Books Summer Guide by ALEXANDER NAZARYAN The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo by Maria Luisa Tucker NYPD Inaction Over a Missing Black Woman Found Dead Sparks a Historic Racial-Bias Lawsuit (9) Sean Gardiner Devo-Inspired Art in East Williamsburg (8) Maro The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo (5) Maria Luisa Tucker David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal' (4) David Mamet Runnin' Scared: Deep South of Houston: Is a Soul-Food Restaurant Too Black for Soho? (4) Runnin' Scared: Chloe A. Hilliard

Alcohol is an active player here, a chameleon-like, multi-hued seducer. Her drinking is "fetishistic" and makes her yearning "swell." Zailckas describes the 14-year-old friend she shares her first drink with as having "deflowered" her. "Natalie is tender afterward, the way I imagined she'd be." A college trip to Canada allows her group to "consummat[e] our lust," i.e., drink legally. Specific drinks inspire more passion than specific boyfriends.

Zailckas is by turns loner and conspirator; fresh from a stomach pumping at age 16, she feels helplessly lost. (On a bender with a friend, she breaks into a frat house and steals valuables.) Zailckas emphasizes her gender as a culprit, suggesting that women are more vulnerable to alcohol's (c)harms, examining specifically female motives—to impress guys, to make sex easier, to look and feel hotter. However, Zailckas too often mistakes her own fears (of romance, dating, "the real world") for every woman's.

Most jarring is how clear-eyed and eloquent a narrator Zailckas is, often making it hard to picture her as a sloppy drunk. She leaves the reader hanging as to exactly how she moved from adult drinker to wise, abstaining sage. By inserting statistics about teenage drinking and examining drunk-girl porn sites to make her point, Zailckas detracts from her vivid personal story. Teenagers don't care where they fit along national norms, only among their peers. To Zailckas's credit, her compelling prose and searing but imperfect analysis make up for the occasional know-it-all tone. While her rant on the word whatever is unnecessary, her no-holds-barred look at her problem drinking and the culture supporting it is the wake-up call she clearly intended.