Posted on: Sunday, January 16, 2005
Story of woman's hunt for strung-out mom troubling
By Wanda Adams
Advertiser Books Editor
"WEST OF THEN" by Tara Bray Smith; Simon & Schuster, hardback, $24
The jacket describes "West of Then" as "tender," "dazzling," "devastating." I found it exceptionally well written but troubling and essentially unsatisfying. The book is, I think, half-cooked — that is, Smith isn't done with the issues involved (and how could she be — still in her early 30s with years of self-exploration and self-knowledge ahead of her; her mother still, by all reports, addicted and on the streets?). Though well-dressed in cosmopolitan sophistication, the book felt like a child's ineffectual taunt, "I'll get back at you, so there!"
A book like this should offer the reader something beyond the sense of watching a car crash unfold; there must be something to learn — something about forgiveness, perhaps, or survival. I left the book without knowing what I had been given except a lot of uncomfortable information about people I don't know. This is not surprising, perhaps, when you read these lines from Smith's epilogue: "Now I have all these stories and they don't go together in the way I wanted to make me understand. What explains us? Nothing."
A memoir that has been getting a lot of attention is this work by a former Islander now living in New York, whose mother, a one-time flower child from a well-connected haole kama'aina family, is literally lost to drug addiction. Despite years of dealing with her mother's erratic behavior, Smith becomes alarmed when the older woman isn't heard from for a time, and returns to Hawai'i to find her mother, who is strung out and living in a city park.
