“Unlocking the Secrets Beneath: Dive into the Haunting Depths of Stephanie Clare Smith’s ‘Everywhere the Undrowned'”
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:
