Straight up

Zalickas imparts hard-earned wisdom in Colgate College talk

By: Dan Poster

Posted: 3/1/05

"I was 16 and I almost died."

She sounded almost surprised.

"I nearly forgot about the time I was rushed to the hospital for alcohol poisoning. They pumped my stomach. And I nearly forgot."

Koren Zailckas' words, laced with sorrow and regret, disturbed the sober air last night at Colgate University, where she read from her newly released book "Smashed," the memoir of a girl who drank away four years at Syracuse University.

The small, bashful girl graduated in 2002 never knowing what a sober day in college was really like. She wandered the Hill in a stupor each day, seeking out her next drink. The idea that her life was going nowhere, that her friendships were paper-thin and her family was in agony, barely registered in her mind.

"I was getting straight As," she said. "That's a myth; that you have to be dropping out to have a problem. I found that out the hard way."

But she wasn't blinded by goggles of peer pressure, or by a school that offers young girls every opportunity to party with older fraternity men - Zailckas blames neither her friends nor SU for her troubles.

"This could have happened anywhere - it does happen anywhere," she said. "I don't think Syracuse is any different than most other colleges around the country in terms of drinking."

If anything can take some blame for the madness, for a 16-year-old girl that scared her father to death one summer night, for a college student who never learned how to hold a sober conversation, for a graduate whose only ambition was drunkenness, it's ignorance, Zailckas said.

"As girls, we never knew we were more susceptible to alcohol," Zailckas said to a crowd of nodding women in the crowd. "We had no idea."

And it never took much to get the tiny girl so drunk that she would regret it the next day. Zailckas retold tales of horror to the audience; stories that made people stare at their shoes.

"I was not having sex in college," she said, emphasizing the sanctity that she still kept for intercourse. "I was a 19-year-old virgin. Then I woke up next to a guy in a fraternity without my clothes on in the morning. I didn't know what happened. I didn't want to know what happened."

After Zailckas' speech, most of the crowd rushed forward to get their books signed. Some girls expressed their appreciation for what Zailckas toiled to share with the world.

"It was so interesting," said Sara Radin, a freshman English major at Colgate. "She spoke so well about drinking, about how it's universally accepted as a social event."

That was an important point Zailckas harped on repeatedly.

"I'm not telling people not to drink," she said. "That's their choice."

Other students walked away wondering if maybe their friends - or even they themselves - were stumbling down a path similar to Zailckas'.

"It really taught me something," said Lindsey Scialabba, a freshman psychology major at Colgate. "She reminded us that drinking is still a dangerous thing, even if you don't think you have a problem."

It was crucial, Zailckas said, to drive home this point in her book by being as open and honest as she could about her experiences with alcohol.

"I had to write the book like no one was gonna read it," she said, "not my boyfriend, not my parents. No one."

But even though Zailckas' no longer drinks, it's important to recognize that her book is not a self-help book, she said. It wasn't written so that other girls could follow her road to recovery.

"I'm not really in a position to give anyone advice," she said.

"Smashed" was written to let people sample the flavor of total recklessness, to show them a side of college hooliganism rarely displayed.

"It's OK for us to talk about our problems," Zailckas said. "We're taught to be ashamed of them. But (childhood alcoholism) is not a personal problem, it's a cultural problem.

"It kept me from my sanity. It kept me from developing healthy relationships. It kept me from life."

"Smashed" has enjoyed two weeks on The New York Times best seller list. And while Zailckas' admits it's thrilling to be so highly-acclaimed at the age of 24 on her first attempt at writing a book, it can never match the personal feedback she receives from her readers.

"To know that there are people who feel less alone now," she said. "That's what made this book worth writing."