The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays

(Paperback)

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Palo Alto, California, is home to stratospheric real estate prices and equally high expectations, a place where everyone has to be good at something and where success is often defined by the name of a prestigious college on the back of a late-model luxury car. Its also the place where Irena SmithSoviet migr, PhD in comparative literature, former Stanford admission readerworks as a private college counselor to some of the countrys most ambitious and tightly wound students . . . even as, at home, her own children unravel.

Narrated as a series of responses to college application essay prompts, The Golden Ticket combines sharp social commentary, family history, and the lessons of great (and not so great) literature to offer a broader, more generous vision of what it means to succeed.

Reviews

Tackling childhood and parenting in a new way, The Golden Ticket shows that growing up in America is an increasingly difficult job. With humor and pathos, Irena Smith draws the reader behind the curtain of college admissions, where life is more complicated than any kid's file.
Malcolm Harris, author of Kids These Days and Palo Alto

At a time of an unprecedented youth mental health crisis, Irena Smith's addictively engaging, literary, witty, and heartrending memoir couldn't be more timely and important. Thank goodness she had the courage, smarts, and perfect perspectiveat "the intersection of unbridled ambition and family dysfunction"to create it.
Katherine Ellison, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author of books including Buzz: A Year of Paying Attention

Irena Smith has crafted a brilliant, hilarious, and keenly perceptive memoir that should be required reading for any parentespecially those Type-A among us who know exactly what child wed like to order from the menu. College application essaysand parental aspirations part like curtains to reveal the ever-daunting challenge of raising humans into adulthood.
Sonya Huber, author of Voice First: A Writer's Manifesto

I started reading and couldnt stop. Irena Smith has written a remarkable memoir of her lifepainfully honest, touching, and marvelously funny, mixing wisdom about the madness of college admission today and her own family story.
Jon Reider, coauthor of Admission Matters, former Stanford admission officer, and cofounder of SLE, Stanfords freshman humanities program

. . . the writing throughout The Golden Ticket is remarkably strong and makes for a highly enjoyable read. The narration is erudite and entertaining; the author's skill and devotion to craft are apparent from the first page to the last.
The BookLife Prize

Author Bio

Irena Smith was born in the former Soviet Union and grew up in Moscow in the waning days of the Brezhnev regime; in 1977, her family emigrated from the USSR and sought asylum in the United States as political refugees. She has been published in HIAS@130: 1+30: The Best of myStory, Mama, PhD: Women Write about Motherhood and Academic Life, Literary Mama and Art in the Time of Unbearable Crisis. She has a PhD in comparative literature from UCLA and lives in Palo Alto, California.