Author of The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays, 2023 Gilda Winner
Irena Smith says she is still in a state of happy disbelief that her book, The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays, was chosen for the Gilda Award. “What makes it particularly meaningful is its recognition of the razor edge between laughter and tears, where so much of my memoir lives.”
The author emigrated from the former Soviet Union when she was nine years old. “When we arrived in San Francisco, I spent several months tearfully insisting that I would never, not ever, learn to speak English.” But she eventually did, in large part, she recalls, “through faithful viewing of The Brady Bunch and Gilligan’s Island reruns after school. But I also grew up in a house full of both Russian and English-language books, so ever since I was little, I’ve embraced a love of popular culture as well as reverence for great literature.”
As for writing, it’s something Irena has been doing as far back as she can remember. “Entries in a travel journal after my parents and I left the USSR, diaries when I was in middle school, and of course reams of academic papers in college and grad school. I didn’t start writing personal essays until I was in my early thirties; up until then, I was fairly certain that I would become an academic, not a writer. So my turn to writing creative nonfiction came as a bit of a surprise even to me,” says Irena.
In college, Irena majored in English and minored in Russian over the objections of her parents, who wanted her to become an engineer like them. By the time she received her doctorate in comparative literature from UCLA, she says, her parents had reconciled themselves to the fact there would be no convincing her to become an engineer.
“Since completing my dissertation, I’ve taught college-level literature and composition courses, worked as an admissions officer in Stanford’s Office of Undergraduate Admission, and headed an independent college counseling practice. I continue to be fascinated by how immigrants assimilate to their new homeland, in life as well as in literature, and (inspired by my own experiences as a child, a parent, and a college counselor) by how we perceive and define success for ourselves as well as for those we love.”
Before writing The Golden Ticket, Irena wrote an essay for the anthology Art in the Time of Unbearable Crisis, a collection of essays and poems from women authors three months after Russia invaded Ukraine, with 100 percent of the proceeds from book sales going to World Central Kitchen.
“My essay,” says Irena, “described The Master and Margarita, a book by a Ukrainian-born author that holds enormous personal significance for me, and its resonance as a beacon of resistance against tyranny and repression.”
The Golden Ticket, meanwhile, came out of Irena’s experiences as a college counselor, admissions officer, and parent. It came into being, she says, “because of the weight of living with the cognitive dissonance of counseling ambitious, tightly wound students who wanted more than anything to get into Stanford or other good schools as I was struggling to help my own children, who were just trying to get through each day.”
In the meantime, the award-winning author has already begun working on another book. “The spine of the story is a road trip to California’s central coast that my mother, daughter, and I went on at the beginning of 2023. But it’s also a meditation on immigration, travel, and exile as well as on relationships between mothers and daughters.”
Irena says she didn’t get much writing advice, but that one idea she came across was the suggestion to just start; that it didn’t have to be at the beginning but you had to start. As for advice she herself would like to share, Irena says it would simply be to keep writing. “Even if you can’t manage more than a couple of minutes a day. Writing continuously and consistently starts to generate its own energy, and there’s no greater feeling when a piece of writing takes on a life of its own.”
