Fury

The author of the iconic New York Times best seller Smashed undertakes a quest to confront her own anger.

In the years following the publication of her landmark memoir, Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, Koren Zailckas stays sober and relegates binge drinking to her past. But a psychological legacy of repression lingers - her sobriety is a loose surface layer atop a hard- packed, unacknowledged rage that wreaks havoc on Koren emotionally and professionally.

When a failed relationship leads Koren back to her childhood home, she sinks into emotional crisis - writer's block, depression, anxiety. Only when she begins to apply her research on a book about anger to the turmoil of her own life does she learn what denial has cost her. The result is a blisteringly honest chronicle of the consequences of anger displaced and the balm of anger discovered. Listeners who recognized themselves or someone they loved in Smashed will identify with Koren's life-altering exploration and the necessity of exposing anger's origins in order to flourish in love and life as an adult. Combining sophisticated sociological research with a dramatic and deeply personal story that grapples boldly with identity and family, Fury is a dazzling work by a young writer at the height of her powers that is certain to touch a cultural nerve.

Also listen to Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood .

©2010 Koren Zailckas (P)2010 Penguin Audio