Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

I absolutely LOVED this book! I couldn't wait to get back into my car for my commute just to listen to it. Amazing!

Honest. Raw. Inspiring! Thank you for this pull-back of the curtain .... which is not unlike a mirror.

As a high school counselor, I listened to this book thinking it might help me understand self-abuse. I must confess that it only left me more confused. Even after hours of listening, I still cannot comprehend why someone fairly intelligent can keep making the same mistakes again and again. I also found the author's parents incomprehensible. How could they ignore the danger signs - and then have their younger daughter also go in the same direction? Even so,I think the selection was worth listening to.

This is a book about excess. Excess alcohol, excess metaphors. It's hard to decide which is more repelling-- the author's repeated debauchery in the cistern of alcoholism or her over-metaphored writing style. I found both equally hard to take. As a father of daughters, I hoped to gain some insight into peer pressures girls and young women face so I perservered to the end of this too-long tome. Big mistake. Read any chapter in the middle of the book and you have "the take home message". I could sacrifice wading through an unappealing writing style for the sake of knowledge but it was a struggle that was singularly unrewarding. I wish the author well in her stuggle to remain sober and to eke out a living with her writing.

This book is a little boring. Not because it is badly written, but because the author is too young to be writing memoirs. What she considers to be "revelations" - for example - that frats are filled with way too much testosterone and create a group mentality that in some cases can be dangerous, are not news to anyone else, except maybe the types of sheltered young women who join sororities. This book involves a lot of navel gazing, and the pivotal moments in her life that she records are only pivotal moments because the author is 22 or 23. I agree with another review that I read which implies that the author was simply looking for something to write about taken from her uneventful life.

never even listened to these, the first set was so uninteresting. Guess that must be what it's like to be perpetually drunk

Author makes a big deal out of nothing. This is the story of most sorority girls in college. It gets a little more interesting after she leaves college but nothing compared to real stories about alcoholics, such as Alcohol: A love story, or Dry. Author struck me as needing a tale because she is a writer.

The story jumps around a bit, but overall it's worth the time--there are some real lessons to be learned in Zailcka's experience. This book demonstrates how even 'good' girls from stable and loving families can find themselves in the self destructive pattern of alcohol abuse so early in life. The story really hit home for me, having only been out of college a few years myself and having witnessed many of the behaviors she describes. I can't help thinking of how different college, or even high school, might be for so many girls if they only read this book early enough.

I was not as impressed with this book as I thought I would be. It was almost as if I kept waiting for it to get started or maybe it just seemed that the writer would give you just enough info to get you interested then make you guess what happened. There were too many "years later........" Isn't this girl only like 24 or 25 and didn't she just write the book? Anyway, I am glad she was able to stop her self-destructive behavior.