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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.