Koren Zailckas
Koren Zailckas
Koren Zailckasis a bestselling American writer and memoirist. Her debut, Smashed, was released in 2005 by Viking Penguin and became a New York Times bestseller. Zailckas attended Nashoba Regional High School in Bolton, Massachusetts and Syracuse University...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
bad depend examples fantasy powerful remain stuck using version versions women
As long as we depend on other women for self-esteem, using them as bad examples or fantasy versions - special, powerful - of ourselves, they remain stuck in a narcissistic version of themselves, too.
catching ways
I'm getting there. I'm catching up, I think. I feel like I have a ways to go.
again drinking mask memories scary stupid
It was drinking and doing stupid things, or drinking and having scary things happen, but then drinking again to ... mask the memories of it.
deal parents point students
I really think, at this point in time, it does have to be all of us who deal with that as culture. It has to be students and parents and administrations and the government.
thinking normal emotion
I think, for one, we have to really accept that anger is a normal human emotion that can be a positive force for change.
cute girl gone
Me? I'm just a literary girl gone wrong. Slow with the tongue. Quick with the pen. Undeniably cute. But, on the whole, ill-equipped for the privilege of living.
plato circles bottles
Without a bottle to hold, I feel incomplete, the way Plato says we are each born only half a circle, and we spend out lives seeking out our other half. A drink is my beloved. Without it, I am wanting; I feel half finished.
gun voice lines
I am aware that somewhere along the line, I've subconsciously turned down the pitch of my speech, like a silencer of a gun that softens the sound of its firing. Now, even when I yell, I don't feel like I am using my full voice.
writing feelings ambitious
I'd written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one's own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I'd made a habit--and eventually a profession--of memoir because I hail from one of those families where shows of emotions are discouraged.
yoga healing circles
There's a limit to my patience with anything that smacks of metaphysics. I squirm at the mention of "mind expansion" or "warm healing energy." I don't like drum circles, public nudity or strangers touching my feet.
cutting sandwiches pieces
My demeanor isn't that of a woman enraged. To see me slumped, glassy-eyed, holding a sandwich someone has cut for me into four "manageable" pieces, a person might tell you I look much more like a woman subdued.
girl father party
I'm sick of the ignorance that lack of funding has generated, of the fathers who apporach me at dinner parties with their four-year-old girls clasped to their pant legs and say, "Yeah, but studies say kids can buy drugs more easily than they can buy alcohol." To which I always respond, "I guess that means you keep heroin in your liquor cabinet?
college two alcohol
But in college, we can wear our alcohol abuse as proudly as our university sweatshirts; the two concepts are virtually synonymous.
school writing piano
For the first month of school, writing is its own upper. Pounding on my computer keys feels like playing the piano, like arranging words into harmony that sings back to me.