Fury

June 28, 2010
Zailckas, who tackled her teenage binge drinking in Smashed, delivers an intriguing and often heartbreaking follow-up on uncovering—and embracing—her anger. The project began as a scholarly examination on the way Americans approach anger, but morphed, in the four years Zailckas spent writing it, into something deeply personal: an examination of why she always denied her own feelings of rage. Everything comes to a head after she returns to her parents' Massachusetts home after following her then-boyfriend, Eamon, to England, where the relationship quickly soured. Zailckas returns home and sinks into a deep depression, which only heightens her writer's block, and sends her on a short-lived homeopathy kick. She begins therapy and starts to chip away at years' worth of emotional denial and pent-up feelings that came from living with a family where "anger was off-limits because it tap into everybody's fear of inadequacy and imperfection." Zailckas is at her most blisteringly honest when she's trying to wrap her head around her complex and often-strained relationship with her mother. But despite the liberal doses of academic quotes, Zailckas steps out from behind the shield of her intellect and confronts her emotions head-on, even when it hurts.

June 15, 2010

The author of Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (2005) searches for the root of her unbridled anger.

In the prologue, Zailckas sums up the impetus behind her second memoir: "I set out to write an objective book about modern remedies for anger and I ended up with an achingly personal account of why I went looking for remedies in the first place." The story begins at the author's low point—fresh from a break-up overseas—and quickly sweeps the reader into her desperate search for acceptance and compassion from a family that had rarely shown either. Her rocker ex-boyfriend—whom she humorously nicknames "the Lark" ("he shared the bird's talents for both singing and flight")—was not the cause of her rage, however, but rather the entry point that allowed Zailckas to delve deeper into the anger issues that have long haunted her. While the author's brutal depictions of rage—regularly directed at loved ones and strangers alike—often leaves the reader feeling slightly disgusted by the her egregious behavior, these strong feelings are the result of the reader's investment in the outcome. When Zailckas's therapist asked her to construct a personal ad, the author was unsure how to proceed: "Stunted rage-a-phobe seeks mother substitute for validation eternal? Must enjoy impassivity, mixed messages, and occasional blasts of displaced aggression?" Her sharp sense of self-deprecation, while comically dark, passes far beyond the boundaries of humor into a terrain of frank, and often brutal, self-assessment. Throughout, Zailckas is keenly aware of her inability to cope with anger. While the trajectory of this anger shifts from her boyfriend to her family, with the help of her therapist, she eventually hones in on its true source—her mother. Yet as the reader soon learns, discovering the source of her anger is only the first small step toward ridding herself of the problem.

A harrowing tale of one woman's journey into the depths of her own psychosis.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

September 1, 2010
Zailckas, who was dubbed the face of teenage binge drinking for her best-selling coming-of-age memoir Smashed (2005), offers another raw, memorable chronicle of emotional recovery. The projects trajectory is eerie. While researching a book on anger, Zailckas falls for a British rock musician and follows him to England, where they break up in a seismic night of bitterness and rage. Back home with her parents, twentysomething Zailckas attempts to pull herself out of catatonic grief with homeopathic remedies and endless reading: I think I can elude my own emotions by crawling into my research and dying there. Incorporating quotes from diverse sources, from psychologists and psychiatrists to peace activists and even Shakespeare and Nabokov, Zailckas connects theories about anger with her own life experiences, and what begins as an abstract inquiry into anger becomes, in fact, an intimate, lyrical portrait of a young womans discovery of love and understanding. More than the numerous quotes from authoritative voices, all meticulously sourced in an appendix, its Zailckas confessional, vivid personal stories that will stay with readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)