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Wasted: Tales of a Genx Drunk
The author recounts his own struggle against alcoholism, and describes his research into the causes of addiction and the history of treatment and recovery
259 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1997
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443 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
September 25, 2018
This is a terribly written book that might keep Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court, so, five stars for that.
Want to read
September 25, 2018Correction
In previous articles, I may have inadvertently given the impression that journalists were not entirely to be trusted. Taken out of context, expressions like "enemies of the people", "persistent, shameless liars" and "scum" could have been interpreted by malicious troublemakers as evidence that I have less than total confidence in the writings of the Fourth Estate.
I would like to take this opportunity to correct any such misunderstandings. When Mark Judge, a highly respected member of the journalistic profession and a gentleman of unimpeachable character, says that his memories of thirty-five years ago fail to corroborate the obviously fabricated accusations of some dubious female, then I think we should pay him the compliment of taking him at his word. It would be an insult to this fine citizen's reputation to demand that he testify under oath, and one hopes that our country has not yet sunk to such abject depths.
Thank you.
In previous articles, I may have inadvertently given the impression that journalists were not entirely to be trusted. Taken out of context, expressions like "enemies of the people", "persistent, shameless liars" and "scum" could have been interpreted by malicious troublemakers as evidence that I have less than total confidence in the writings of the Fourth Estate.
I would like to take this opportunity to correct any such misunderstandings. When Mark Judge, a highly respected member of the journalistic profession and a gentleman of unimpeachable character, says that his memories of thirty-five years ago fail to corroborate the obviously fabricated accusations of some dubious female, then I think we should pay him the compliment of taking him at his word. It would be an insult to this fine citizen's reputation to demand that he testify under oath, and one hopes that our country has not yet sunk to such abject depths.
Thank you.
good-to-know-it-s-out-there
September 27, 2018Anyone who enjoyed this book by the best friend of Republican Supreme Court candidate and alledged teenage rapist Brett Kavanagh will probably also enjoy this article in which he describes how, when much older and returnee to Catholicism, he was inspired to find that prowling around young girls in bikinis at summer camp and taking their picture was in fact a form of Holy Sacrament. To quote.
A recent article explored how men prefer regular bathing suits to string bikinis; they like something to be left up to the imagination. I think a Christ-centered man with a healthy appreciation of women can admire the female form, and express that admiration in a sacramental way, if the form is respect by him and the woman who owns it.
I can’t understand why Mr Kavanagh doesn’t want Mr Judge at the SCOTUS hearing as a character witness, him being so Christian and all that.
From Mr Judge’s article I Am a Catholic Bikini Paparrazo
A recent article explored how men prefer regular bathing suits to string bikinis; they like something to be left up to the imagination. I think a Christ-centered man with a healthy appreciation of women can admire the female form, and express that admiration in a sacramental way, if the form is respect by him and the woman who owns it.
I can’t understand why Mr Kavanagh doesn’t want Mr Judge at the SCOTUS hearing as a character witness, him being so Christian and all that.
From Mr Judge’s article I Am a Catholic Bikini Paparrazo
nope
September 27, 2018Quick!! Some publisher needs to reprint this!!! I expect an increase in interest to read about "Bart O’Kavanaugh".
September 18, 2018
I was curious about this book because of "Bart O'Kavanaugh", Working at my library I pulled up the e-version and spent two hours reading it and avoiding my work. Was it worth it? Well, it was interesting but mostly for the drunken stories and the fact that it's about posh kids doing bad things in the DC suburbs. The part about alcoholism and if it is a spiritual disease versus a biological one was a bit boring.
October 2, 2018
Used copy happy to loan it to anyone who reads.
Rich boys chug vodka and give girls Hawaiian punch with grain alcohol. One party blurs to another, slash and burn them down. Drink until you forget or vomit. Black out drunk does not mean you are passed out- it means your mind blurs. Never recall the names. They are the mean cool "soach" group. Their code says: it's fine to use people as they are a more fabulous JAKE RYAN 's and look like Harrison Ford; buy they are cruel users.
Hard to follow his enlightened recovery, the narrative is boring, and the writing poor.
"Grody barf me out bore."
Rich boys chug vodka and give girls Hawaiian punch with grain alcohol. One party blurs to another, slash and burn them down. Drink until you forget or vomit. Black out drunk does not mean you are passed out- it means your mind blurs. Never recall the names. They are the mean cool "soach" group. Their code says: it's fine to use people as they are a more fabulous JAKE RYAN 's and look like Harrison Ford; buy they are cruel users.
Hard to follow his enlightened recovery, the narrative is boring, and the writing poor.
"Grody barf me out bore."
June 29, 2008
Blah. I read this book for the same reason I watch the A&E show Intervention: pure fascination with human self-destruction. It's not a noble interest, but I admit to it. But this book didn't satisfy that hunger. Quite honestly, I wanted the guy to be more of a drunk than he was...he didn't seem much like a drunk at all, but a guy who occasionally drinks too much and gets a hangover. Maybe that says something about myself...
October 10, 2018
I don't care about this douchebag's struggle alcohol or recovery. I was looking for the dirt on Kavanaugh. I can't believe that entitled piece of trash got confirmed on the Supreme Court.
October 1, 2018
An invaluable tool! I’m buying one for every member of the Senate Judiciary Committee as a gift, together with a bookmark folded into a heart out of donation receipts from Planned Parenthood made in honor of Bart O’Kavanaugh. But whatever happened to PJ and Squi?
October 4, 2018
In the About the Author page at the end of this godforsaken book, Mark Judge describes himself as an “award winning journalist”. If ever conservatives had an actual argument for how participation ribbons have ruined America it is this. God knows what he won his awards for, but it certainly wasn’t Wasted: Tales of a GenX Drunk. Frankly, its astounding this book was ever published at all in the days before the internet and Amazon allowed for the explosion is self-epublishing.
It’s terrible. It’s rambling, self-indulgent, poorly-written, surface-thin, and other hyphenated negative descriptors. It’s college creative writing 101 introspection wrapped in high school English comp level prose. As if his literary inspirations weren’t already transparent enough, in one of his (many) seemingly condensed or unlikely anecdotes he relates his introduction to the work of Hunter S. Thompson, as if the reader needed it stated explicitly that Judge is just another asshole that thinks a typewriter and a predilection for alcohol abuse is all it takes to be “pure ersatz gonzo” or “genuine faux Thompson”. Having suffered through the rather extensive excerpts of the “editorials” that earned those laudatory self-reviews, I feel comfortable in correcting the presumed typo. They are pure ersatz garbage.
Incapable of meaningful self-assessment of his writing while simultaneously lodging his head deep up his own ass, what Judge finds worthy of relating over other more potentially revealing insights frequently leaves the reader baffled. At one point, when relating how he almost got expelled in grade school for stealing pens from his classmates, he quotes his teacher, a nun, as saying, “Giggling during Mass is one thing. Even the time you boys tried to crawl through the ceiling from the boys to the girl’s bathroom was almost understandable. But this is different. This is theft.” Putting aside the utter unlikelihood of those sentences – and really all of the extensive dialogue quoted verbatim in this tome despite the, at best suspect, contemporaneous note taking of a blackout drunk high school kid – Judge gives us a two-page story about stealing Bic pens with only a passing reference (made approvingly! By a nun!!!) to his Mission Impossible-style caper attempt at crawling through the ceiling of the school to play Peeping Tom on girls in the bathroom!
At least he is consistent with the utter banalities he feels worthy of regurgitation, later treating the reader to a rather lengthy digression reliving his “takedown” of a Bruce Springsteen live album. It includes another extensive excerpt of the kind of anti-popular music album review that every self-styled sixteen year-old wannabe iconoclast has composed and that has hinted at the future career path of any number of people who ended up Pitchfork album reviewers in the early aughts. The only difference is he was a decade older when he wrote it and older still when he felt it worthy of being republished here, not burned amid prayers of thanks that it existed in a pre-internet age that allowed it the mercy of being forever forgotten.
If only “Bart O’Kavanaugh” hadn’t caught the cultural zeitgeist, or at least not been credibly alleged to have sexually assaulted several women, Wasted too, could have mercifully been forgotten sparing all of us a book of alcohol abuse and the subsequent tale of redemption through God, swing dancing, and long passages of high school book report style discussions of other (one hopes better) books on addiction and recovery. Also, lots and lots of overly explained references to Lord of the Rings. If 2018 increasingly resembles Mordor, it seems entirely unfair that this book hasn’t been cast into the fiery pits to spare us all.
It’s terrible. It’s rambling, self-indulgent, poorly-written, surface-thin, and other hyphenated negative descriptors. It’s college creative writing 101 introspection wrapped in high school English comp level prose. As if his literary inspirations weren’t already transparent enough, in one of his (many) seemingly condensed or unlikely anecdotes he relates his introduction to the work of Hunter S. Thompson, as if the reader needed it stated explicitly that Judge is just another asshole that thinks a typewriter and a predilection for alcohol abuse is all it takes to be “pure ersatz gonzo” or “genuine faux Thompson”. Having suffered through the rather extensive excerpts of the “editorials” that earned those laudatory self-reviews, I feel comfortable in correcting the presumed typo. They are pure ersatz garbage.
Incapable of meaningful self-assessment of his writing while simultaneously lodging his head deep up his own ass, what Judge finds worthy of relating over other more potentially revealing insights frequently leaves the reader baffled. At one point, when relating how he almost got expelled in grade school for stealing pens from his classmates, he quotes his teacher, a nun, as saying, “Giggling during Mass is one thing. Even the time you boys tried to crawl through the ceiling from the boys to the girl’s bathroom was almost understandable. But this is different. This is theft.” Putting aside the utter unlikelihood of those sentences – and really all of the extensive dialogue quoted verbatim in this tome despite the, at best suspect, contemporaneous note taking of a blackout drunk high school kid – Judge gives us a two-page story about stealing Bic pens with only a passing reference (made approvingly! By a nun!!!) to his Mission Impossible-style caper attempt at crawling through the ceiling of the school to play Peeping Tom on girls in the bathroom!
At least he is consistent with the utter banalities he feels worthy of regurgitation, later treating the reader to a rather lengthy digression reliving his “takedown” of a Bruce Springsteen live album. It includes another extensive excerpt of the kind of anti-popular music album review that every self-styled sixteen year-old wannabe iconoclast has composed and that has hinted at the future career path of any number of people who ended up Pitchfork album reviewers in the early aughts. The only difference is he was a decade older when he wrote it and older still when he felt it worthy of being republished here, not burned amid prayers of thanks that it existed in a pre-internet age that allowed it the mercy of being forever forgotten.
If only “Bart O’Kavanaugh” hadn’t caught the cultural zeitgeist, or at least not been credibly alleged to have sexually assaulted several women, Wasted too, could have mercifully been forgotten sparing all of us a book of alcohol abuse and the subsequent tale of redemption through God, swing dancing, and long passages of high school book report style discussions of other (one hopes better) books on addiction and recovery. Also, lots and lots of overly explained references to Lord of the Rings. If 2018 increasingly resembles Mordor, it seems entirely unfair that this book hasn’t been cast into the fiery pits to spare us all.
October 4, 2018
f- f- fl-flames... on- on the side... of my FACE
October 14, 2018
First of all, I didn't buy this book - I got it as a PDF that some nice Twitter soul posted online during the Kavanaugh frooferaugh, which meant it had some kerning issues, but whatever. No missing pages, as far as I could tell. And all of the snippets were there that news outlets had posted in various news stories, so I feel relatively confident that I got a valid, scanned, copy.
Second, yeah, it is as poorly written as everyone says it is. Mark Judge is a terrible writer. How this got published, I have no idea. The writing is stilted, and if he had an editor at whatever publishing house picked it up, I doubt he used their editing comments, because ... because it's awful. Unless it was even worse before an editor got to it? Oh my lord.
Anyway, as drunken memoirs go, I'm not so sure about that either. This kid led a charmed life. Nothing bad ever happened to him. I'm totally serious. He went to a private school, he had undiagnosed ADHD, so he screwed up a lot, but his parents were tolerant of him, he got some odd jobs and went to college, and he drank like a fish. Then he stopped because it was getting to be too much, even for him. Honestly, it's not worth a memoir, especially not a poorly written one.
Second, yeah, it is as poorly written as everyone says it is. Mark Judge is a terrible writer. How this got published, I have no idea. The writing is stilted, and if he had an editor at whatever publishing house picked it up, I doubt he used their editing comments, because ... because it's awful. Unless it was even worse before an editor got to it? Oh my lord.
Anyway, as drunken memoirs go, I'm not so sure about that either. This kid led a charmed life. Nothing bad ever happened to him. I'm totally serious. He went to a private school, he had undiagnosed ADHD, so he screwed up a lot, but his parents were tolerant of him, he got some odd jobs and went to college, and he drank like a fish. Then he stopped because it was getting to be too much, even for him. Honestly, it's not worth a memoir, especially not a poorly written one.
October 22, 2018
A tale of endless partying by the author, starting in his high school years where the "fictional" Bart O'Kavanaugh makes his appearance. Unfortunately, things grow very dark for Mr. Judge with blackouts and fights due to his large consumption of alcohol. He is a talented writer and manages to land a part-time job because of it. Eventually, he finds help in AA though his path is not an easy one. Copyright 1997.
Read
October 10, 2008read this while working at Hazelden between '98-'00
October 5, 2018
Of course, the only reason I read this was for the Bart O'Kavanaugh reference. But that was literally just one sentence and it has been reported on well. That being said, there is nothing special from a literature standpoint. But I did appreciate it for helping me understand the prep-school, privileged kid standpoint. It should be noted that some journalists have said Kavanaugh played a big role in this book. He does not. If this is a true account he was not even that close of a friend to Judge.
The book ends with Judge's grappling with his alcoholism. It seems that when he wrote this book he was still a newbie to the recovery scene and so I highly recommend you do not take his view seriously. My guess is that they have evolved. But still, it is interesting that the book's main thrust is about recovery and his grappling with how to do it. This is probably why there isn't more about it in the press as pertaining to the whole Kavanaugh brouhaha. It does not fit neatly into anyone's narratives and so it is mostly ignored, except for the one piece of hearsay surrounding Kavanaugh's ralphing.
The book ends with Judge's grappling with his alcoholism. It seems that when he wrote this book he was still a newbie to the recovery scene and so I highly recommend you do not take his view seriously. My guess is that they have evolved. But still, it is interesting that the book's main thrust is about recovery and his grappling with how to do it. This is probably why there isn't more about it in the press as pertaining to the whole Kavanaugh brouhaha. It does not fit neatly into anyone's narratives and so it is mostly ignored, except for the one piece of hearsay surrounding Kavanaugh's ralphing.
October 7, 2018
Pseudo-autobiographical work of a man as he comes to terms with his alcoholism. The first half is a mostly unmemorable retelling of rich kids getting drunk, like a bad 80s film. The last half is accepting his condition and his issues with the AA program.
For those looking for insight/dirt into Brett Kavanaugh, this is the complete reference to (presumably) him in the book:
"Do you know Bart O'Kavanaugh?"
"Yeah. He's around here somewhere."
"I heard he puked in someone's car the other night."
"Yeah. He passed out on his way back from a party."
That's it. He barely qualifies as a character, more of an aside in a conversation between two people.
I did like the character Corey Joyce though. He had good reading and listening suggestions for a punk in the 80s.
If you like reading redemption stories or people struggling with personal demons, you may like this book. Otherwise, you may not find it that gripping.
For those looking for insight/dirt into Brett Kavanaugh, this is the complete reference to (presumably) him in the book:
"Do you know Bart O'Kavanaugh?"
"Yeah. He's around here somewhere."
"I heard he puked in someone's car the other night."
"Yeah. He passed out on his way back from a party."
That's it. He barely qualifies as a character, more of an aside in a conversation between two people.
I did like the character Corey Joyce though. He had good reading and listening suggestions for a punk in the 80s.
If you like reading redemption stories or people struggling with personal demons, you may like this book. Otherwise, you may not find it that gripping.
December 9, 2018
I, like many others read this book as a result of the Kavanaugh hearing. Surprised to see that his name was mentioned once in the entire book. Not really damning evidence.
The book was pretty ho hum, the story of a privileged party boy who realizes his drinking habits are much different than those around him, ultimately I just felt sorry for the guy. He seems like a fragile person
If you want to learn about alcoholism, from someone who is an alcoholic who did some studying of the topic then maybe you will enjoy this book.
If you are looking for facts or even innuendo that would substantiate anything to do with Dr Fords testimony you won’t find it here. Though I completely believe her and the entitled, drunken behavior that could not be unique to Mark Judge is confirmed a couple times in this book.
The book was pretty ho hum, the story of a privileged party boy who realizes his drinking habits are much different than those around him, ultimately I just felt sorry for the guy. He seems like a fragile person
If you want to learn about alcoholism, from someone who is an alcoholic who did some studying of the topic then maybe you will enjoy this book.
If you are looking for facts or even innuendo that would substantiate anything to do with Dr Fords testimony you won’t find it here. Though I completely believe her and the entitled, drunken behavior that could not be unique to Mark Judge is confirmed a couple times in this book.
March 12, 2020
During Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, many people made repeated mentions of his prep school friend Mark Judge’s memoir, WASTED, and how it effectively illustrates both Judge’s and Kavanaugh’s abusive behavior toward women while they were inebriated. The few extant copies of the memoir became hot commodities as everyone wanted to read the juicy details for themselves. Finally, a year and a half later, my library’s only copy arrived with my name on it. And oy vey—what a shit show. First, Kavanaugh (or rather, Bart O’Kavanaugh, as he’s known in the book) is only mentioned once in passing. He never actually appears as a character in the book. And to make it worse, the whole memoir is terribly written. I can’t believe I spent so long waiting for this!
October 4, 2018
I read this due to morbid curiosity about "Bart O'Kavanaugh". It was honestly a terrible book, full of excuses and never really taking responsibility for his actions. For example, the biological vs psychological alcoholism part sounded like a way for him to excuse his behavior because it "wasn't his fault". I am pretty surprised that he was working as a writer because the writing was.....not good in this book. Save yourself the trouble and pass on this one.
October 4, 2018
Much more thoughtfully written than all the negative reviews portray. I suspect they never read it. They’d be surprised to read how liberal his leanings were when he was young. Catholicism mentioned in both negative and positive terms. His main focus seems to be to help alcoholics. He admits to cheating on his girlfriend in high school and being a sloppy drunk. This doesn’t absolve him from any potential crime. Read and make your own opinion.
November 19, 2018
Like most Americans, I had no idea this memoir existed until the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. When I heard of it, I immediately checked the library to see if I could read a copy, but they didn't have it, so last week when I happened to see it on the "Recently Added" tab, I borrowed it. About 25% of the way through, I realized this was a heavily edited and republished version of the original book. It was good as a memoir, but not what I was expecting.
October 8, 2018
I couldn't resist
October 8, 2018
Pretty much what you would think
October 28, 2018
Confessional of an entitled life. Can see it being very helpful for the intended audience, folks in recovery. Otherwise, not nearly as good as a John Hughes movie.
January 25, 2019
Easy read about a spoiled prep school student's decent into alcoholism.
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews