REVIEW: Everywhere the Undrowned by Stephanie Clare Smith

Review by Eileen Vorbach Collins

In her stunning debut memoir, Everywhere the Undrowned (University of North Carolina Press; Feb. 2024), Stephanie Clare Smith walks us through the summer she spent on her own, at fourteen, in a New Orleans apartment while her mother went off on an adventure. Knowing she’d have no way to reach her, the teen writes her name in black Magic Marker on the soles of her mother’s shoes.

“She couldn’t see my name on the black soles, but it was there, touching the ground with her, wherever she was, around, somewhere.”

As someone also on my own at a young age, Smith’s words touched me in places I seldom go, remembering the danger and loneliness of that long-ago time. There were many of us, sometimes hiding in plain sight, shoplifting food items, knowing if we were caught there’d be no one to bail us out. Panhandling for change to avoid being apprehended.

The story of Smith’s alone summer and its ensuing trauma is told in small, introspective paragraphs into which she skillfully weaves threads of mathematics, science, etymology, and a lonely teenager’s worst fears.

Smith writes of going to summer school that year, having failed algebra. She is fortunate to have a teacher who inspires her.  Her prose transports me to the year when, at fourteen, I’d failed eighth grade and summer school wasn’t an option. My sister, a gifted student three years older, and like me, a habitual truant, had failed 11th grade English and History. She paid me with her babysitting wages to assume her identity and take her place in the classroom. I loved those classes and should have charged more because I aced them.

When the walls of Smith’s apartment are too much to bear, she starts riding the streetcar’s continuous loops late into the night and befriends a driver named Gifford.  Thereafter, she waits for his car.

On the fifth of July, at 10 PM, feeling as if everyone else had enjoyed the fireworks and festivities the night before, Smith takes some of the money her mother had left in an envelope for groceries. She’d like a cheeseburger and cola.  It’s a mile walk to the K&B. She is raped at knife point.

Gifford’s streetcar now feels safer than the apartment where she hears every sound at night. Where filled with self-blame and sorrow, she listens to her eyelashes scrape across the pillowcase. Where she piles pots and ashtrays in front of the door with the crappy lock. And where she sleeps with her head where her feet used to go so she can see the door with her homemade alarm and sleep until the pots come crashing down.

Smith’s relationship with Gifford evolves into one offering protection and sexual exploitation in equal measure. Perhaps she almost loved him at times.

I once slept with a hammer under my pillow, empty tin cans stacked inside the door. Roach hotel with a no vacancy sign under the bed.  I had my own version of Gifford in those days. Perhaps I almost loved him at times. As Smith writes, “It didn’t seem strange to me that I was so young and he was all grown.”

The book’s unconventional structure of short, sometimes unconnected (but connected) thoughts is divided into thirteen parts as the author moves on, but never far away from, that life-altering summer. The hurt and fear of it stay with Smith—and with us—as she carries it forward into her career as a clinical social worker helping neglected children and families in crisis. She references her own life in retrospect:

“I sat in my mediator chair surprised no one else could hear my fourteen-year-old defender rise up from the ashes, again and again, chanting—She loves me, you know. She loves me.”

Later still, when in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina her hometown is in ruins, Smith brings her mother to live with her in Raleigh. When her mother is diagnosed with a form of vascular dementia, Smith takes on the role of caregiver in the way that, paradoxically, sometimes manifests in those who have lacked that nurturing. Perhaps her training as a social worker impacts her ability to face the challenge of providing a stable home for the mother who was unable to do the same for her. But more compelling is Smith’s identity as an empath, clear from her writing well before she pens the word.

“An empath is a person with an extrasensory antenna.”

Smith tells us, “There are three ways that people become empaths. Some are just born as extra-sensitive beings. Some have parents who nurture this trait. For the rest, this extra is born of a trauma. The way your sense of smell changes when you smell your own trauma.”

“Dear eleven-year-old Linda. I feel you,” Smith writes of a child who, years earlier, was kidnapped, raped and murdered.

In between these tiny paragraphs, among the threads of this complex patchwork of facts and feelings, I found a strong connection. My fourteen-year-old self found kinship with Stephanie Clare’s fourteen-year-old self. I saw her in the droves of young people who once congregated in that Baltimore park, panhandling for their next meal, selling nickel bags of pot and tiny pills of unknown composition guaranteed to make you forget your problems, if just for a while. Kids trying to keep warm while appearing cool.

My half-century older self recognized this woman I have never met. Another writer putting her vulnerable self onto the page, opening a vein, as Hemingway might have said, to finally tell the story that needed telling.

Having read and loved Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Smith writes, “Am I kin to her? Am I channeling her? Am I friends with her?

After reading Everywhere the Undrowned, I wonder the same about Smith.