I have at least one thing in common with North Carolina–based writer Stephanie Clare Smith: we share a fascination with Harry Houdini, the great magician, escape artist—and keeper of secrets. “Harry Houdini said that his audience never saw the hours of torturous self-training it took to overcome fear and master the illusion,” Smith writes in her new memoir. “They saw only the miraculous way he held it together.”
The book is set in the summer of 1973 when Smith was a young teenager, alone, and living in New Orleans. Her mother was on a cross-country road trip. “A mile walk to the K&B on the day after the Fourth for a cheeseburger and cola seemed like a small thing I could do,” Smith writes. Instead, the 14-year-old was abducted while she walked along Saint Charles Avenue. The man drove her in his pickup truck to a nearby park and raped her at knifepoint.
“Every escape exacts its own price,” Smith writes in Everywhere the Undrowned: A Memoir of Survival and Imagination, a memoir of trauma, escape, recovery, and the winding, crooked path of secret-keeping. Published in January, Smith’s book is the first in a series of literary nonfiction works to be published by Great Circle Books, an imprint of UNC Press.
INDY: You are a survivor, and I think that’s what you mean by “undrowned.” Not only surviving the assault, but your life.
STEPHANIE CLARE SMITH: I play around with that word. The word “undrowned”—it has a lot of different meanings. One is how I was able to swallow my feelings and survive this assault. There’s that kind of survival. My memoir is about how sometimes you sink and then swim. And what is that like? There are so many survivors of so many kinds of things. I learn something from every single person’s survival story. And if someone can learn something from mine, great.
What sorts of reactions have you gotten to the book? It is very heavy. To the point where I had to periodically stop and catch my breath. Even though I’ve never gone through what you’ve been through, there are things I could relate it to in my own life.
A lot of people tell me that. I was so focused, when the book launched, on the writing. Is it good enough? Are people going to understand it? I didn’t expect this other thing. I’m 65. If I was younger, it would be impossible for me to have my life so exposed. It’s the complete opposite to how I’ve lived. This was my story. I spent most of my life running from it. But I’ve gotten to a certain place where I feel like I’m looking for a place to land the plane. That’s what makes it possible for me to stand in front of people and talk about it and do readings. Otherwise, it could be really, really challenging. It’s been quite an evolution to go public with it.
When you were a kid, you lived a very internal life. That was something very interesting to me about the book—I was inside your head. You were neglected as a child, but you felt the need to protect your mom. That’s a common feature of neglected children, right?
Very common.
What’s the psychological mechanism at work there?
Love. We’re wired to love our mother, to love our main caregiver. My young mind would do anything to keep her close and take the blame. We’re wired for connection and we’re wired to survive. As a kid, you’ve got to please your tribe, because you don’t want to be left behind. I didn’t have lots of allies or support. My mother was the most reliable thing. And yet she was incredibly unreliable. Very erratic, but charming. She was like an intellectual Judy Garland. She was a free spirit. People wanted to be around her.
At the end of her life, you were her caretaker. Did you come to a peace with her at the end?
You know, what’s funny—it’s not funny—I had all her undivided time. She had dementia. It was this horrible irony that finally she stopped moving away from me. What I’ve finally done now is see a much more holistic view of my mother that does involve a lot of compassion. I also have a lot of sadness and frustration at the way I was raised.
The Washington Post, in their review of your memoir, called this book “prose poetry.” A perfect phrase, I think. For me, reading your prose was like reading poetry. I’d read your words quickly to get a sense of it, and then I’d read the words again to peel away the layers. And I read your book a second time and realized I missed a lot the first time.
I take that as a compliment. It’s jam-packed. [Laughs.] Some of the paragraphs are complete poems. I just took away the line breaks and added some punctuation. Every single word, the way I write, is like polishing things to the max. Every word is carrying a lot of weight. I moved things around, and my agent helped me do that. “It needs a little more space here,” she’d say. “Let’s make some space. This is so intense.” W
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Comment on this story at [email protected].