Margaret Talbot: The Extraordinary Resilience of Elizabeth Smart: The New Yorker Elizabeth Smart sat backstage in a ballroom of the Washington Hilton hotel, where, in a few minutes, she would be telling an audience of sixteen hundred teen-agers her story of survival. It has been eleven years since a vagrant abducted Smart from her family's home, in Salt Lake City, when she was fourteen. After nine months of captivity, during which she was repeatedly raped and threatened with murder, she was rescued by the police, in Utah. Smart's speech was the keynote address of the annual conference of Key Club International. It was a steamy July day, but Smart looked composed in a ruffle-collared black dress, her blond hair in a chignon. She had no notes. I told her that I liked her red shoes, which reminded me of the ruby slippers that Dorothy clicks to return home from Oz. "Every girl should have a pair," she said. Don't you think? At the lectern, Smart began by conjuring the kind of ordinary girl she was when she went to bed on June 4, 2002. That evening, she'd spent a lot of time persuading her parents to let her join her best friend's family on a vacation to a small town in Utah, only to have her older brother, Charles, tease her about how boring the trip was sure to be. She'd shot back, "Hey, what if those are the last words you ever say to me?" The audience laughed, nervously. A few minutes later, Smart arrived at the part of her story where she woke in the middle of the night with a knife at her throat. The ballroom got very quiet. Although Smart will never escape being associated with the lurid captivity she endured, she has chosen to remain a public figure and has been unusually successful at doing so on her own terms. She is a full-time advocate for the prevention of child abuse who lobbies for legislation and heads a foundation. She delivers some eighty speeches a year, and they reliably end on a note of quiet resilience. She told the teen-agers in Washington, "Never be afraid to speak out. Never be afraid to live your life. Never let your past dictate your future. . . .