By: Irena Smith
ISBN: 978-1647424640
She Writes Press, 2023
2023 Gilda Prize Winner
What do we, as parents, really mean when we say we want the best for our children?
Irena Smith tackles this question from a unique vantage point: as a former Stanford admissions officer, a private Palo Alto college counselor, and a mother of three children who struggle to find their place in the long shadow of Stanford University.
Written as a series of responses to actual college essay prompts, this witty, raw memoir takes the reader from the smoke-filled lobby of the Hebrew Aid Society in Rome, where Irena and her parents await asylum with other Soviet refugees in 1977, to the overpriced house she and her husband buy in Palo Alto in 1999, to the hushed inner sanctum of the Stanford admissions office. Irena grows a successful college counseling practice but struggles to reconcile the lofty aspirations of tightly wound, competitive high school seniors (and their anxious parents) with her own attempts to keep her family from unraveling as, one by one, her children are diagnosed with autism, learning differences, depression, and anxiety. And although she doesn’t initially understand her children—or how to help them—she will not stop stumbling and learning until she figures it out.
The Golden Ticket opens a much-needed conversation about extreme parenting, the weight of generational expectations, and what happens when Gen-X dreams meet unexpected realities. It's a sharp-eyed depiction of hard-won triumphs and of the messy, challenging parts of parenting you won't see on Facebook or Instagram. Above all, it's an invitation to embrace a broader, more generous definition of success.
About the Author
Irena Smith is a former Stanford admission officer who currently works as an independent college counselor in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was born in the Soviet Union in the waning days of the Brezhnev regime and emigrated to the United States with her parents when she was nine years old. There, in spite of her fierce insistence that she would never, ever learn to speak English, she went on to receive a PhD in comparative literature and to teach literature and composition courses at UCLA and Stanford before transitioning to college admissions and writing. Her writing has appeared in Mama, PhD and Art in the time of Unbearable Crisis, and her interests include reading three or four books at one time, championing the Oxford comma, and routinely infuriating her family by pointing out the difference between \\\"less\\\" and \\\"fewer\\\" at every opportunity. The Golden Ticket is her first book.
To learn more about Irena Smith and her work, please see www.irenasmith.com
