Koren Zailckas has written a memoir, Smashed, about her drinking experiences and her eventual renunciation of the bottle. The only surprising thing is that Zalickas penned this tale at the tender age of 23–in other words, she’s somehow managed to cram the whole cycle of tentative experimentation, excess, and clear-eyed abstinence into less than a decade. Perhaps it’s my stereotypically Irish reaction, but it’s difficult to make your jaw drop when you hear that she sometimes got very drunk at student parties. What’s next? A memoir by a supermarket shelf stacker that reveals that the job occasionally involved arranging displays of detergent boxes? And one wonders at what point during her brief debauchery did she realise there might be a book in it?More about the baby boozehound’s exploits at Salon.