When Koren Zailckas took her first drink at 14, it started her on an eight-year binge. Why do girls drink themselves into oblivion? She talks to Anna Mundow about her intoxicated life

'As the doctor told my father, a few more drinks and I'd have fallen into a coma or died right there'

It is hard to imagine Koren Zailckas getting tipsy, never mind drunk. The tiny 24-year-old looks like an angel, and has the voice and smile of a sweet child. So what is this?

"I passed out in a puddle of my own vomit. I imagine it was mostly liquor, because my dad told the doctor I didn't eat dinner that night. Before that, I pulled my shirt up over my shoulders to show my bra to someone's brother because, knowing I was slipping into oblivion, he'd asked me what colour it was . . . The girl whose house we were at brought out a pair of pilled sweatpants because I'd retched all over my jeans . . . They tried to give me a shower, to clean off the combination of liquor, vomit, dirt and leaves that was adhered to me.

"I'll never know if I was fully naked . . . because I am too embarrassed to ask."

This is Zailckas at 16, experiencing - or rather not experiencing - her first blackout. She is about to have her stomach pumped. It could be worse. She could be dead. "At 16, I'm 5 feet 2 inches and 105lbs, which means it would take about one hour of downing eight to 10 drinks to kill me," she writes. "I'd had half a thermos of vodka, plus immeasurable sips of rum and Kahlua . . . As the doctor told my father, a few more drinks and I'd have fallen into a coma or died right there on the dock."

Frightening, but not frightening enough to make her stop. Zailckas spent the next eight years drinking her way through school and college before quitting alcohol last year and writing Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, a raw, merciless chronicle that is far more than a fashionable teen recovery memoir.

Mary Karr, author of The Liars' Club, observes that ". . . wit and insight . . . raises the book far above the issue of young drinking. Zailckas has captured what's unfortunately become a quintessential American girlhood".

David Jernigan, research director of the Centre on Alcohol and Marketing and Youth at Georgetown University, goes even further: "Smashed blows to smithereens the myth that alcohol is the 'safe drug' in young people's lives. Koren Zailckas puts a personal face on the leading drug problem among our youth, and shows the side of teen drinking that won't appear in a beer ad."

This intensely personal story of a good daughter who grew up in a loving, middle-class Boston home is, it turns out, the story of Everygirl. With teenage girls increasingly matching boys drink for drink in the US, and all-women colleges here reporting a 125 per cent increase in frequent binge drinking between 1993 and 2001, the gender gap is rapidly dissolving in a pastel sea of wine coolers and novelty drinks, all designed to appeal to younger women.

While the profits are significant - college students, after all, spend $5 billion (€6.5 billion)on alcohol each year - the serious, often fatal consequences of equal opportunity abuse are more difficult to measure. Studies showing that females are biologically more susceptible to intoxication and alcohol poisoning are routinely countered by studies concluding that gender is a less critical factor.

Zailckas can only speak for herself, a small person who did her best to obliterate her consciousness. Taking her first slug of Southern Comfort at 14, she felt teenage shyness and confusion evaporate. Before long she could shock even the school's bad girl by raiding Billie's mother's refrigerator for booze.

"Billie wears a horrified look . . . I should get used to it. I will see this look many times in the years to come. I'll see it later in high school, when, a month after an alcohol overdose, someone sees me taking shots of tequila. I'll see it in college, when someone sees me drinking beer before noon to alleviate a hangover . . . It's the look you'd give a pregnant woman who orders a rum and Coke."

Two years later, Zailckas missed the first day of a young writers' conference because she was having her stomach pumped. Afterwards, her shocked parents talked sensibly to her; they did not shout or accuse, but recently Zailckas's mother told her, "When you choose to stay at home to raise your kids, a dead-drunk daughter makes you question an entire decade's worth of motherhood." Zailckas's sister, who was 11 at the time, will not learn about "the time Koren nearly died" until she is 18, when her mother presents it as a cautionary tale.

Zailckas, however, had just begun her intoxicated life. "Before and after college, drinking oneself into a state of blissful oblivion requires a degree of secrecy," she says. "In high school, it needs to be hidden from parents. In the working world, it must be downplayed to bosses, or concerned friends, or lovers. But in college, we can wear our alcohol abuse as proudly as our university sweatshirt; the two concepts are virtually synonymous."

Attending Syracuse University, the secret drinker became a troublesome (and troubled) party girl. Recalling an erstwhile boyfriend, for example, she writes: "We met a month earlier, in the dorm bathroom, where I was getting sick after a night of downing 7&7s. The room felt damp as a sea cave, and Milton found me in one of the stalls, where I was drifting to sleep with my cheek on the toilet seat and hugging the bowl like a life preserver. In memory, he was a giant sea beast that latched on to me, kissing me right there on the tiles without even bothering to help me up from my space among the stray wads of toilet paper."

All the so-called rites of passage are here: sorority parties, frat parties, dorm parties, spring break in Cancun, Mexico, where Zailckas, a moody drunk, disdainfully watches as her college mates ". . . get blighted on Alabama Slammers and enter the hotel's infamous wet T-shirt contest . . . then meet men from state universities and reality TV shows, with whom they exchange cell-phone numbers . . ."

Poor at friendship, Zailckas was worse, it seems, at sexual intimacy, and has no memory of losing her virginity. "There's only one thing to do when you're not sure what happened during a blackout, and that's to keep on not being sure," she jokes. There is black humour in these tough recollections but no swaggering; Zailckas remains as shy today as she was in high school, an unlikely celebrity author of an unlikely book.

"Suddenly it's open season on this part of my life," she admits, "but I felt it was important to say these things, especially to young women, at a time when advertisements tell us that we become more powerful when we drink, that we become sexier, that it's another way of reinventing ourselves."

Two years ago, having graduated and moved to Manhattan, Zailckas woke up one morning in an unfamiliar apartment with her friend, Vanessa, passed out next to her on the bed. "The last thing I remember is one of the men licking my foot and the other kneading the side of my thigh with the heel of his hand," she writes.

Today Zailckas realises that when she hit rock bottom she had a comparatively soft landing. "While I was writing this book, women emerged in astounding numbers to tell me their stories. I've heard about the 16-year-old girl in an alcohol-induced coma, whose parents had to switch off her respirator. I've heard from grown women who, in their youth, hid dozens of empty bottles in bins under their beds . . . I was lucky."

Her soft-voiced message is that it is better to be conscious.

Smashed: Story of a Drunken Childhood, by Koren Zailckas, will be published in the UK by Viking next month