Irena Smith
Three Generations, Three Days, and a Very American Road Trip
June 11, 2026
4 PM PDT | 5 PM MDT | 6 PM CDT | 7 PM EDT
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In winter 2023, I went on a three-day road trip to California’s Central Coast with my 77-year-old mother and 22-year-old daughter. Along the way, we braved a severe winter storm, encountered ferocious ostriches, binge-watched the second season of The White Lotus, fell under the enchantment of an outdoor light installation, shared stories, and embarked on meandering quests for coffee with plant-based milk.

When we returned, I found myself obsessively returning to the details of our trip. I was especially fascinated by how much had happened over a relatively short period of time, and I began writing short vignettes about specific moments. Almost immediately, it became apparent that I was telling a story about much more than a short road trip; layered into the narrative were stories about my grandmothers, my family’s emigration from Soviet Russia, and my daughter’s childhood and adolescence in Silicon Valley. I also realized that in some ways, my narrative echoed the structure of Homer’s Odyssey, complete with family mythologies, obstacles, dangers, detours, and revelations.

While the story of our road trip is told chronologically, Troika’s structure is fractal: it moves associatively between present-day scenes and memories of Soviet childhood, immigration, parenting, marriage, and professional life. I used seemingly ordinary moments to create entry points into larger questions about identity, assimilation, aging, ambition, and emotional inheritance. And while the road trip provided a narrative backbone sturdy enough to hold shifts in time and tone while still creating narrative momentum, I wanted the structure of the memoir to reflect how memory actually works: nonlinear, layered, and emotionally driven.

Writing the memoir also helped me understand how much of my life had been shaped by inherited ideas about achievement, scarcity, resilience, and reinvention. As the daughter of Soviet immigrants and the mother of neurodivergent children, I found myself constantly negotiating competing ideas about success and belonging. The process of writing Troika became a way of examining not only my family history but also what we pass down—or keep to ourselves—across generations.

Discussion points:

• Using a contained journey or compressed timeline as the organizing structure for a memoir
• Identifying patterns and thematic threads in your life and translating them to the page
• Embracing a patchwork structure, including different literary registers—in my case, mythology, literature, pop culture, and television
• Managing shifting timelines
• Writing about family members
• A short writing exercise to find layers in your own story

BIO
Irena is the author of the award-winning memoir, The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays (2023) and Troika: Three Generations, Three Days, and a Very American Road Trip (2026). Her obsession with words began early (as a child growing up in Soviet Russia, she was known to occasionally stand on furniture and recite Pushkin poems), and her writing focuses on migration, memory, motherhood, generational expectations, the petty indignities of middle age, and the importance of embracing a broader, more generous vision of success.

Irena’s writing has appeared in The Huffington Post, Writer’s Digest, and Electric Literature. She also writes two Substacks, Personal Statements and The Curmudgeon’s Guide to College Admissions, and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, a rotating cast of children, and two ungovernable cats.

Website: irenasmith.com

IG: irena.smith

Substack:
Personal Statements
The Curmudgeon’s Guide to College Admissions