Irena Smith on Troika

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Thursday, April 23 at 2:30 PM on KPFK 90.7 FM: My guest this week is Irena Smith, the author of a defining, or perhaps further defining memoir from a writer, memoirist and raconteur whose storytelling accommodates or contextualizes nearly any circumstance, and bring insight, humor, and welcome complication. In her latest, Smith chronicles an unlikely if completely, joyfully contrived road trip up and down the California coast with her mother and her daughter, adding to the itinerary family history, politics, books, popular culture, Greek myth, scholarship, sociology, language and the series The White Lotus.  The book is Troika: Three Generations, Three Days & a Very American Road Trip. Irena Smith is the author of a previous bestselling memoir, The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays. That book demystified if also critiqued the college admissions process and asked big questions about the nature of striving, success, and learning, all using the thoughtful conceit of responding to those weird application essay prompts, which assume so much and often frighten students. Troika relies on an appreciation, a celebration writing and idiom, language and vocabulary. It doesn’t hurt that Smith is also an expert on Greek mythology, and along the way, teaches us bits of Soviet Russian culture, literature, and language. She is hilarious and ironic in the way, perhaps necessarily embraced by many immigrants to the United States, an ex-stranger in a still very strange land.

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