I grew up in a family that despised displays of strong emotion, rage in particular. We stewed. We sulked. When arguments did occur, they were full-scale conniptions, and we regarded them as family failings. Afterward, we withdrew from one another and tried our best to strike the event from our memories.

Koren Zailckas

Categorized in : Best Memories Strong Family

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.

Koren Zailckas

circles bottles plato

I once heard someone say that the concept of moderation seems a little extreme, and tonight...I agree.

Koren Zailckas

tonight alcohol littles

But in college, we can wear our alcohol abuse as proudly as our university sweatshirts; the two concepts are virtually synonymous.

Koren Zailckas

alcohol college two

I’ve been thinking I’d like to be Daisy; I’d like to have someone like Gatsby stare at my house for whole years and never stop dreaming of me

Koren Zailckas

dream years thinking

But lately, when I’m drunk, I feel a hostility that I’ve never known before. It is a tension deep in my gut that makes me want to yell until my face is red, knock over glasses with the back of my hand, and kick people I don’t know in the shins.

Koren Zailckas

glasses hands people

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.

Koren Zailckas

ambitious feelings writing

I have been a ballerina, a cheerleader and a sorority girl. I was the girliest girl alive.

Koren Zailckas

sorority alive girl

Like most women, I remember my first drink in tender minutiae.

Koren Zailckas

drinking remember firsts

My boyfriends have all been as stoical as queen's guards. They'd been patient, committed, and dispassionate, and I'd had to really debase myself to extract any emotion, either grin or grimace, from them.

Koren Zailckas

ex-boyfriend my-boyfriend queens

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.

Koren Zailckas

cutting sandwiches looks

I think for one, we have to really accept that anger is a normal human emotion that can be a positive force for change.

Koren Zailckas

normal emotion thinking

I dont know where the idea originated that memoir writing is cathartic. For me, its always felt like playing my own neurosurgeon, sans anesthesia. As a memoirist, you have to crack your head open and examine every uncomfortable thing in there.

Koren Zailckas

cracks writing ideas

I think statistics go in one ear and out the other. All of us respond to stories more than numbers.

Koren Zailckas

stories numbers thinking

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?

Koren Zailckas

party girl father

I grew up in a family that despised displays of strong emotion, rage in particular. We stewed. We sulked. When arguments did occur, they were full-scale conniptions, and we regarded them as family failings.

Koren Zailckas

argument emotion strong

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.

Koren Zailckas

girl gone cute

I can’t help thinking about memoir as a down-and-up process: Dive down for color; come up for context. Sink back down for action; climb back up for self-awareness and gratitude.

Koren Zailckas

gratitude self thinking

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.

Koren Zailckas

keys writing school

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.

Koren Zailckas

voice gun sound

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.

Koren Zailckas

circles yoga healing