Lost and Found

TARA BRAY SMITH '92 REACHED OUT TO HER HOMELESS MOTHER—AND DISCOVERED HER WRITER'S VOICE IN THE PROCESS.

TARA Bray Smith never intended to be a writer. "I always loved language and reading and writing, but to actually call myself a writer? That's crazy!" she says. In fact, after graduating with an English degree in 1992, Smith tried her hand at almost every other career. Boarding school teacher, telemarketer, German restaurant waitress, proofreader at Ogilvy & Mather in Chicago. "I got so bored working there, I started reading the dictionary" she says. "I got to 'a-n', then realized I needed to move on."

Move on, she did. Her fascinating memoir, West of Then: AMother, a Daughter, and a Journey Past Paradise, is being praised by critics all the way from Elle magazine to The New York Times. "Smith blends reportorial objectivity with the baring of her soul to sublime effect," writes one. Her story, frankly told but with the rich, warm backdrop of Hawaii to soften its edge, centers around Smith and her heartbreaking, hard-to-abandon relationship with her mother, Karen. Despite a privileged past, Karen, a fifth-generation haole, or white Hawaiian, became addicted to heroin while Tara was a child. Abandoned by her mother when she was just 7, Smith was raised by her father and stepmother in Kauai, but her mother remained a fixture in her life. In West of Then, published by Simon & Schuster last October, Smith weaves childhood memories of her mother with the story of her 2 002 journey to Honolulu after learning that Karen, as she refers to her mother throughout the book, had become homeless. "I was trying to figure out what was happening with my mom at the same time I was trying to figure out how to write about her," says Smith, 34, who now lives in Brooklyn. "The book was very messy for most of its life. It only came together in the eleventh hour."

Not unlike Smith herself. It was as a Dartmouth student that she began writing stories about her mother, then in rehab, and her family's Hawaiian history. In fact, segments of her honors thesis can be found in varying forms in the book. "I'd say she came in with the most clear talent of anyone I've ever taught," says Smith's senior thesis advisor, professor Cynthia Huntington. "There was such a sense of urgency and a clarity to her writing." Still, between the painful subject matter and Smith's own need to understand the material better, writing outside the nurturing arms of Sanborn House was something she wasn't ready to tackle. Not until she got a glimpse of herself at her fifth-year reunion in 1997. "Everyone else looked great and had well-paying jobs and I was just confused and wearing this really weird dress. I'd listened to House of Mirth on tape on the drive from Chicago to Hanover and I just thought, 'Oh God, that's going to be me. I'm going to die pathetic and poor.' "

She applied to the M.F.A. program at Columbia instead, and moved to New York. She made some money writing a quickie paperback on a subject she knew too well (Why Won't the Landlord TakeVisa? The Princeton Review's Crash Course to Life After Graduation) but her primary focus was writing the story she was meant to tell. "I was obsessed with it," she says. "I couldn't move on until I told it."

Her hope now is to help get her mother, still using drugs, off the street. "I'd love to be able to buy her a house someday," she says. Karens reaction to the book, which her daughter showed her in galley form before it went to print, oscillated between praise and disapproval, but it did more to mend their relationship than harm it. "Families can get through a lot more than you'd think," says Smith, who is close with her two younger half-sisters from later relationships that her mother had. "Its painful to write truthfully, but you don't need to lie."

The big question weighing heavily on Smiths mind today is, what now? After West of Then was put to bed, "I went into this huge depression," she says. "It was cathartic and liberating, but I also felt really directionless and weird, like a part of me had died. I was like, 'Where do Igo from here?'" Smith, who returned to the Dartmouth campus for a reading in the Wren Room in February, is toying with setting a book at late-1980s Dartmouth. Until she's so inspired,you'll have to go to the young adult section of your local bookstore to catch Smith's next title. Under the pen name Solo Smith, she's writing a three-book series to be published by Little Brown in 2006 called Betwixt. She describes it as Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets TheOutsiders. "It was my idea, so I can't even pretend I'm just doing it for the money!" she says. She's also growing accustomed to her new title. "I guess I can say I'm a writer now," she says.

JENNIFER WULFF is a staff writer for People magazine. She lives inConnecticut.