Troika: Three Generations, Three Days, and a Very American Road Trip

Smith (The Golden Ticket) chronicles in this charming, bittersweet memoir a road trip she took across California with her mother and daughter in 2023. Though the trip’s destination—the Field of Light art installation in Paso Robles—is carefully planned, missed turns, minor mishaps, and emotional detours arise after “the stylish one, the responsible one, and the fun one” (Smith’s mother, Smith, and Smith’s daughter, respectively) depart from Palo Alto. As the miles tick by, Smith interweaves travelogue with family history, recalling anecdotes both comic and poignant, including her grandfather’s obsession with CB radios and a disastrous incident when her grandmother accidentally flung her wedding ring into a zoo enclosure in Rome. The women are linked, too, by pop culture, including a shared affinity for The White Lotus (“There is something deeply satisfying in watching rich people having a terrible time in one of the most beautiful places on earth”). Beneath the humor runs a graver current, as Smith discusses her family’s Soviet-Jewish heritage and the varied fates of her ancestors after Germany invaded the Soviet Union during WWII. It adds up to a modest but affecting account of cross-generational exchange. (Apr.)