Cart
Free US shipping over $10
Proud to be B-Corp

The Golden Ticket Irena Smith

The Golden Ticket By Irena Smith

The Golden Ticket by Irena Smith


$14.65
Condition - Very Good
Only 2 left

Summary

In this funny, heartbreaking, timely memoir-told in the form of college admission essays-Irena Smith illuminates the dissonance of working as a college consultant in Palo Alto, California, helping the best and brightest students in the country gain admission to highly selective schools, even as her own children are unraveling.

Faster Shipping

Get this product faster from our US warehouse

The Golden Ticket Summary

The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays by Irena Smith

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. It's also the place where Irena Smith-Soviet emigre, PhD in comparative literature, former Stanford admission reader-works as a private college counselor to some of the country's 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.

The Golden Ticket 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 perspective-at 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 parent-especially those Type-A among us who know exactly what child we'd like to order from the menu. College application essays and 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 couldn't stop. Irena Smith has written a remarkable memoir of her life-painfully 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, Stanford's 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

About Irena Smith

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.

Additional information

CIN164742464XVG
9781647424640
164742464X
The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays by Irena Smith
Used - Very Good
Paperback
She Writes Press
20230418
256
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in very good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

Customer Reviews - The Golden Ticket