Barrelhouse Reviews: Everywhere the Undrowned by Stephanie Clare Smith

Reviewed by Brianna Avenia-Tapper

The University of North Carolina Press / February 2024 / 142 pp

"When we say the word algebra, we are saying the reunion of broken parts in Arabic." So writes Stephanie Clare Smith in her transcendent memoir about childhood abandonment and rape, the ripple effects of trauma, and the ways we survive. Everywhere the Undrowned begins while Smith is in summer school studying the algebra she didn’t learn the previous year. This same summer, her mother leaves 14-year-old Smith to live on her own in their New Orleans apartment for weeks and weeks. This same summer, Smith is raped at knifepoint by a stranger. "To have less than nothing," Smith tells us, "they created algebra. They made me take it twice."

Before her mother leaves, Smith shows us who her mother was, and masterfully evokes the ache of childhood neglect. She remembers asking her mother not to leave her. She writes that asking for this "was like attempting a U-turn on the high dive at the community pool. Everyone cringes as you climb down the ladder." Smith poignantly renders the creative contortions that her child-self invented to survive this abandonment. The narrator remembers, "I wrote my name and my favorite number 8 in black Magic Marker on the bottom of her shoes…it was there touching the ground with her, wherever she was…"

While Smith evokes the child's perspective, the wise adult she has become is there too, a protective presence on the page. ("Actual: my mother is missing. Perceived: my mother is missing me.") The adult narrator contrasts the ‘actual’ reality with the child’s perceptions. This contrast highlights the way pain and neglect warp the child’s perspective. Smith succeeds in showing how and why children create narratives that reimagine their abuse as their own fault. "I'd like to know what you would do," she writes, "floating around on the dark side of the moon all by yourself." We tell ourselves the stories we need to survive.

Everywhere the Undrowned is a difficult book. I know that we are strengthened by the act of telling such stories, by letting other people into the darkest corners of our experience, by making art from our suffering. As a writer, I know that we come out of the telling more whole, less constricted, more able to cope. And as a reader, I have felt less solitary, less misunderstood, when reading about a familiar pain. "You are not alone in your private tragedy," say our personal narratives. "You don't have to be ashamed."

But the remarkable thing about Everywhere the Undrowned is the careful yet unflinching way Smith has found to write through trauma.  The reader can see and feel her pain with enough safety, support, and wisdom that her work becomes an invitation to heal with her. She has given us this weight so that we might learn how to carry it. In meaty, musical prose, she brings to life that singular, terrible summer, but it's what comes after that sets Everywhere the Undrowned apart from many trauma memoirs.

The day after her rape, Smith goes to babysit a little girl. While Smith is sitting on the couch in the dark apartment, the girl wakes up and is upset to discover her parents left without telling her. Smith holds the younger child in her arms and tells her, "You are completely safe. No one is going to hurt you." These words, which she herself desperately needs to hear, become a gift to someone else in pain. "You cannot always have protection, but you can always give protection,” she writes.

Later, Smith includes a scene from her work as a family mediator, when she is supporting a 14-year-old girl through her mother’s relinquishing her parental rights. Smith notes how this girl, like every girl before her, wanted her mother to take care of her. To give the child a framework with which to make sense of this loss, Smith told her, "If I was put in the pilot's seat of a jet plane, I would not be able to fly that plane…no matter how much I loved the passengers." In other words: your parents’ limitations are not—and never were—your fault. 

By including these scenes of strength and care and shelter she has provided for others, Smith creates the experience of going back to the abandoned, violated child-self as a powerful adult. She shows readers how to care for their smaller selves. She scatters perspective-altering jolts of insight throughout the text ("We tattoo ourselves with the people who won't claim us").

In its poetic upending of old pain, Everywhere the Undrowned reminds me of Lidia Yuknavitch's The Chronology of Water or Melissa Febos's Abandon Me. Like these authors, Smith’s book broadly moves from a past childhood to an adult present, but along the way weaves together a striking combination of ideas and action that seem initially to be unrelated. She hammers words into sentences that surprise and delight. ("We’re socked in, my mother used to say when a weather front pressed down on us like a sinus infection.") Smith’s prose is also tight and muscled ("Most of the time, the noise is a wolf.") This sentence-level heft creates an urgent force that pushes the reader forward.

In the book's crowning moment, Smith thinks of women in history who have been suspected of witchcraft and thrown into the water tied to stones. "...When we surface alive," she writes, "they don't see us as champions…They think we are hexed. What happened to all the rocks wrapped around you?"

Smith answers her own question:

 "We carried the rocks. We are that kind of strong." It is for this reason I believe—as I do about Mary Oliver's Wild Geese— that Everywhere the Undrowned is a text with the power to save lives. When I finished, I felt I had been washed clean, that I had sloughed off something old and heavy. That feeling has stuck with me, turning the pages into something of a touchstone. It is now a text that I come to when I need to steady myself.

"We carried the rocks," I whisper to myself. "We are that kind of strong."

Brianna Avenia-Tapper is a writer, editor, podcaster, and mother of two. She interviews authors about the struggles and triumphs of writing and publishing on the podcast Writing Stories, (writingstories.org). Her essays, interviews, and book reviews have been published in Tahoma Literary Review, Hobart, Pigeon Pages, The Rumpus, River Teeth blog, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. She is currently revising her memoir, Forms of Motion (about impermanence and becoming- a grownup, a mother, a teacher, a writer.) Find out more at briannaaveniatapper.com