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Ralph Waldo Emerson is credited with the oft-cited wisdom about the journey being more important than the destination. Palo Alto author Irena Smith decided to take that advice and apply it to documenting a road trip that she took to Solvang with her mother and her daughter, who goes by the pseudonym “En” in the book. The resulting book, “Troika: Three Generations, Three Days and a Very American Road Trip” was recently published by She Writes Press.
Smith, who was born in Russia and holds a doctorate in comparative literature, was formerly an admissions counselor at Stanford University. Her experiences there led to her first memoir, “The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions,” published in 2023.
“Troika” is written in a similar style, in which Smith weaves the 2023 car trip from Palo Alto to the Central Coast with memories from her childhood as a non-English speaking immigrant, to her struggles as a mother of children with special needs, and the burden of living in the overachieving, high-tech bubble of Silicon Valley. Smith intersperses the story with references to Greek mythology, James Joyce and the HBO series “The White Lotus.” Smith responded to questions via email. Her responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Embarcadero Media: Why did you write this memoir?
Irena Smith: I didn’t set out to write a memoir initially. “Troika” started as some short vignettes, which I wrote a few months after our trip was over because I couldn’t stop thinking about how much happened over such a short period of time: (We survived a terrible storm! We visited a stunning outdoor light installation! We saw ostriches! We binge-watched the second season of “The White Lotus!” My mother, my daughter and I connected in delightful and surprising ways!).
The thing about writing, though, is that you never quite know what wants to be written, and it quickly became apparent that there was a lot more to the story than the itinerary and some entertaining anecdotes — specifically, all the ways the past kept intruding into the present. In a strange way, it felt like my grandmothers were on the trip with us, even though both had been dead for years, and beyond their stories, there were all these other intrusions — fragments of family history, the history of Palo Alto and Silicon Valley, my family’s emigration from Soviet Russia, and even echoes of Homer’s “Odyssey.” I wanted to do justice to all those storylines, and the best way to do that turned out to be by putting them in conversation with each other.
Embarcadero Media: You divulge some very personal experiences in “Troika”; was it difficult for you to relive some of those experiences?
Smith: Difficult and also cathartic and strangely healing. Janelle Hanchett once wrote, “I didn’t want the pain gone. I wanted it to mean something,” and this is how I feel about writing: it allows me to revisit difficult situations at a safe remove and to find meaning in the suffering — or, to borrow from Vladimir Nabokov, one of my favorite writers, to make ornaments of accidents and possibilities.
Embarcadero Media: A key point in the book is your description of how En almost died. It was such a quick reference but so powerful. Was it the reason for the trip, perhaps even the book?
Smith: Definitely. That was a terrifyingly close call, and a stark reminder that you can’t protect your loved ones from harm. Which is why it felt so necessary to go on the trip — because who knows what might happen tomorrow — and later, to write about it, to make it permanent somehow.
Embarcadero Media: How did the book impact your relationships with your mother and daughter?
Smith: I think it brought us closer. We ended up having long conversations about the trip itself as well as about all the things I wanted to make sure I got right in the book, which ranged from my daughter’s interest in tarot and her childhood memories of my grandmother to my mother’s recollections about emigrating from Soviet Russia and our early years in the United States. Both my mother and my daughter were extraordinarily patient, no matter how many times I pestered them with questions (spoiler: many).
Embarcadero Media: You supplement your road trip story with Greek mythology and references to authors like Joyce and Nabokov — why?
Smith: “Supplement” is a perfect word in this case — I mean, there’s only so much material to be squeezed out of traveling 500 miles in three days, right? In fact, when I told my husband I was going to write a book about our road trip, he raised his eyebrows and asked, “That’s a book?”
I knew early on that I didn’t want the story to simply be a travelogue. I wanted to answer more ambitious questions: “Why does this trip matter? Why are we the way we are?” There’s no way to answer those questions in a linear way, because to understand what’s happening in the present, you have to go back to the past, and the farther back you go, the more you begin to understand how connected everything is. And, if I’m being honest, the narrative style is a pretty accurate representation of how I tell stories — digressive, associational, recursive, but always in service of a larger point. It’s just that I often take the scenic route to get there.
Embarcadero Media: You have some issues with Palo Alto, Silicon Valley and perhaps California in general. There is no doubt that you have seen the overachieving, unrelenting need for success through your work as a college counselor. What, for you, is the benefit for living here?
Smith: I have so many feelings about Silicon Valley. I grew up in Sunnyvale in the 1980s, and I still have fond (and probably rose-colored) memories of fruit orchards and wide, safe streets and the sense that the world was full of possibility and promise. I know this is weird to say, but I feel a kind of grief about what it’s become — harder-edged, ruthlessly competitive, relentlessly driven.
At the same time, I have deep roots here; most of my immediate family live on the Peninsula or in San Francisco, I have close friends who live close by, and yes, I still love all the things that are lovable about this area — the weather, the food, the walkability, the proximity of forest and beach, the history of innovation, the diversity of ideas and backgrounds and people. If I had to describe my relationship to Palo Alto and Silicon Valley, I’d say, “It’s complicated.”
Embarcadero Media: What do you hope readers will take away from “Troika”?
Smith: I hope “Troika” inspires readers to reflect on the people, circumstances and coincidences that shaped them. We so frequently take our assumptions and expectations for granted (I know I do!), and I think unpacking where those assumptions and expectations come from — why we are the way we are — is so important.
Irena Smith will appear April 9, 7 p.m., at Books Inc. in Palo Alto, 855 El Camino Real, Palo Alto; booksinc.com. She will be featured in conversation with author Ginny Kubitz Moyer on April 10, 6:30 p.m., at Fireside Books & More, 2421 Broadway, Redwood City; firesiderwc.com/events.
