a love adrift; In a lyrical memoir of her Hawaiian childhood, Tara Bray Smith searches for a mother who is all but lost to her.('West of Then')(Book Review)

Byline: Susanna Moore

West of Then is a daughter's memoir both appalling and inspiring, in which Tara Bray Smith tells the story of her mother's addiction to drugs. Returning home to Hawaii from Manhattan, where she has gone to university and made a new life for herself, Smith searches the streets of downtown Honolulu for her indigent mother, Karen Morgan. The author was born into a family that has lived in Hawaii for several generations and made its fortune in sugar and land. This heritage guarantees a kind of local nobility, even if the changing economy, the loss of the plantations and their profits and privileges, and the many descendants with their disparate interests mean that nothing will, or can, be the same as it was.

Smith's mother and aunts grew up in the hippie culture of the sixties. Smith was born in 1970 and abandoned in 1977. "The moment, of course, is fixed: the hinge upon which swings the rest. Hitherto, I was one person; after, another-the person I am now. What happened was simple, if colorful: Mom was a heroin addict, her second husband, a South African surfboard shaper. . . . We lived at Pipeline, on Oahu's North Shore. . . . The sound track was Rumours or Rod Stewart. Joints were passed around in crab claws." Morgan and one of her sisters (who was not an addict) became, variously, Sufi mystics, masseuses, guitarists, exotic dancers, touch therapists, poets. In one of her hapless attempts to pull herself together, Morgan started a small business called Exotic Weddings of Hawaii. Smith was conceived under a mirrored ceiling at the Los Angeles house of Michael Butler, a rich boy who produced the musical ...