A memoir exploring family, sacrifice, and intergenerational trauma, Troika follows a life-changing road trip—equal parts humorous and soul-stirring—that will resonate with readers drawn to narratives of multigenerational healing and connection.
When three generations of women—Gen X Irena Smith, her seventy-seven-year-old mother, and her twenty-two-year-old Gen Z daughter—pile into a car for a short road trip to Solvang during a severe winter storm, their journey quickly becomes more than just a family outing. Along their travels, the three women visit an ostrich farm and an outdoor light exhibit, binge-watch the second season of White Lotus, share stories, embark on a quest for coffee, bicker, and reconcile.

Troika is a kaleidoscopic, unconventional journey through both the physical and emotional landscapes of identity, migration, and memory, swerving from heartbreak to hilarity and from Russian proverbs to internet memes. Stitching together personal history and literary odysseys, Smith explores the tangled roots of a multigenerational family, from the horrors of the second world war and a childhood escape from Soviet Russia to adolescence and motherhood in the suburbs of Silicon Valley, ultimately weaving an intimate, poignant, and darkly funny meditation on what we carry—and what we leave behind—on the journeys that shape us.