The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays by Irena Smith was the rare book that really surprises me with it’s content. In retrospect I can see how the title can be read both ways–her life written in the style of college admissions essays or her life in college admissions essays. It is a bit of both, she is a person who helps children get into college professionally and she wrote essays about her life as they fit into college admissions prompts. I was expecting it to be more about college admissions (the Golden Ticket part of the title) but it really was about her and her family.

Her family life and how she and her husband viewed their children was frankly disturbing. I kept reading and reading thinking “how could it get worse?” and then it did.

It starts off with her discussing her children she flat out says she has second thoughts about having (which is fine and honest), how she wanted “normal children” after her first child is diagnosed as having autism to her and sending all three of them to “therapeutic” wilderness camps because they are autistic, using drugs and she doesn’t share why for the third child she sent over a period of about five year while they were teenagers.

I’d love to know her children’s side of things, I’ve never read about parents who are so eager to try to ship their children off to boarding school or these wilderness camps for their behavior before. In one part, while their oldest child who is autistic is a teenager, a stranger is with him for a few minutes at a boarding school they are trying to offload him on comes back and to say how much their son loves them and wants their approval and she says it never occurred to her that their child loved her. Instead of leaving him at the boarding school (which they were trying to do without actually telling him–they told him it was a visit after picking him up from swim camp and they were going to leave him there with his dirty camp clothes and send the rest later) they end up sending him to Utah to a wilderness camp that has since shut down. He goes on to return home and graduate college. Her daughter is sent to the wilderness camp after it is found she had been self-medicating for anxiety all through high school (despite being in therapy) and accidentally overdoes on some laced Xanax and being told that if she doesn’t go they are kicking her out of the house right at the beginning of the Covid lockdown. Her husband is even harsher on the children than she is and she repeatedly tells us he’s a pharmaceutical psychologist so you’d think he must know something about people or medications. He is repeatedly show to be ready to cut the children off even when they are minors.

I guess her essays were supposed to be a contrast between her helping children get into elite colleges and her and her mental health professional husband’s choice to send their children away to what has been known for many years to be an abusive “therapy” situation but her job was really irrelevant for the vast majority of the book. .

She never seems to take any responsibility along with her husband for what is going on in their home. It’s like it’s a big mystery she blames on her children not being neurotypical (her other two children have ADHD) and their behavior even though they are children. She vaguely admits they tend to focus too much on their work but what is going on in this house?

She can be funny at times but the way they dealt with the children and she talked about them, particularly her son is autistic was horrifying.

If I was her, I never would have shared any of the thoughts in this book with anyone, much less published it. If she deserves any credit, it is for her honesty. She is very honest in saying they had more children because they wanted neurotypical children after their first child was diagnosed as being autistic. She is honest about wanting them out of her house when they are having behavioral issues. The few times her children do something “good” or accomplish a goal she seems genuinely surprised.

As an aside, I found it very odd that there are many glowing reviews of this book on Goodreads and on StoryGraph by the author, her husband, and people who have worked with her or know her personally. You’d think that a college admissions professional would know how fake that seems.