The Ballroom was filled Wednesday night with roughly 600 students who congregated to hear the ‘Smashed’ life story of author Koren Zailckas, who took the stage to speak about her experiences with alcohol, college life and growing up.

Zailckas, who has been sober for the past three years, opened up her presentation by explaining why she decided to retire alcohol from her life.

She quit when she was 21, after she and a friend woke up in an unfamiliar apartment in New York City. Zailckas couldn’t remember how she got there or whose apartment it was.

She started writing the book ‘Smashed’ when she was 23, after an old memory surfaced of getting her stomach pumped at age 16, she wrote about that experience, which an entire chapter is dedicated to.

Zailckas said another reason she wrote the book was because she felt that the people reporting about the rise in teen girls’ drinking were too distant from the situation.

‘I didn’t agree with what I was hearing from the experts, which essentially was that girls, like myself, are drinking more because we are so liberated, self-confident, and bursting with girl power,’ Zailckas said. ‘With my own experiences, I believe my female friends and I were drinking in a large part due to our unhappiness, lack of self confidence, or if we were drinking together, it was because it was a way to bond as women. Because I was very seldom out there drinking with the guys.’

According to Zailckas, ‘Smashed’ was written to bring about more discussion of alcohol.

‘It’s not a self help book, I’m not trying to rid the world of alcohol. I’m not hear to tell you shouldn’t drink, you should drink, or you should drink in moderation,’ Zailckas said. ‘I just wanted to tell my story from a young girl’s perspective as a way to open up dialogue about alcohol.’

Zailckas never has considered herself an alcoholic because she never felt addicted to alcohol, despite her continued abuse.

‘I don’t identify myself as an alcoholic. I’ve talked to a lot of addiction counselors who have said that alcohol is made of two things – abuse plus addiction equals alcoholism,’ Zailckas said. ‘I certainly had the abuse part down, but I also know that I didn’t feel the addiction or craving with alcohol… but that’s not to say that alcohol wasn’t a problem for me.’

According to Zailckas, most alcohol education programs just focus on drinking and driving, but not some of the other consequences that affected her the most.

‘I really felt the emotional consequences. The fact that I started drinking at 14, kept drinking through high school and college, made me realize once I stopped drinking that I couldn’t make new friends without drinking,’ Zailckas said.

Freshman Kara Butler thought Zailckas’ presentation was an important look into the life of one woman whose story is so relevant in college life.

‘I felt her presentation was an eye-opening experience and I can apply her experiences to those of people I know,’ said Butler.

Tiffani Ziemann, a graduate student, believed that Zailckas’ speech was a worthwhile experience because she didn’t just talk about the usual things that are taught in most alcohol education programs.

‘The fact that it was a real story and that she didn’t say not to drink at all was a way to reach out to the audience. I also think it is important for people to know about the emotional and physical consequences that aren’t talked about often enough,’ Ziemann said.

After the presentation, The BG News had the opportunity to sit down with Zailckas and ask more questions about her life and experiences with alcohol.

Zailckas started drinking years ago for a number of reasons.

‘It started with a little experimentation. I was drawn to alcohol. I think we all are, because it offers the promise of being included. You barely ever see a single person alone in an alcohol ad,’ Zailckas said. ‘You usually see a someone dead center with everyone vying for their attention. Being 14, I thought it was a mark of maturity and as a way to bond with my friends at the time.’

Smashed deals mainly with her experiences with alcohol along with other women, but she believes men deal with a lot of the same issues.

‘I think their are more similarities then differences. I believe men drink for a lot of the same reasons most of the time. Of course women don’t have the lock on drinking, social anxiety, or shyness,’ Zailckas said. ‘I mostly just focused on women because nobody else was or no one was doing it the right way because they were just too far removed from the realities of college life.’

Getting her stomach pumped as a teen served as a deterrent from alcohol for a little while, but it was short lived.

‘I scared the crap out of myself and my parents. They grounded me for a month and I told them I’d never drink again and I so meant it, but in the end my friends were still drinking,’ Zailckas said. ‘At 16, the thing I was most afraid of was being isolated. And the thought of being alone scared me even more so then any consequences that could come from drinking too much at that time.’

According to Zailckas, In the wake of the James Frey incident – in which he admitted to exaggerating and making up stories in his memoir – the whole world of memoirs are under attack.

‘I know that from now on that everytime I do an interview, that someone is going to ask me how much I made up. What makes me sad about that incident is that 3.5 million people read that book, and a lot of those probably never knew what a memoir was before they read it, and now they know that they don’t trust it,’ Zailckas said.