Missing Persons
A Memoir
Will be published approx. on 18. October 2017
Book
Paperback/Softback
244 pages
978-1-943859-46-7 (ISBN)
Description
Missing Persons is a memoir about dealing with death in a culture that gives no help. Greene goes through two losses in quick succession-first, her aunt's passing, sudden and unexpected, then her mother's drawn-out, agonizing death at home. As someone who had never changed a diaper until then, she is spectacularly ill-equipped for the challenges of caring for a dying person. Nor is she prepared to confront other losses, long repressed, that surface at this time: the suicide of her younger brother and death of her father. As the professional identity on which she has based her selfhood comes to feel brittle and trivial, she is catapulted into questions of "who am I?" and "what have I done with my life?"
Greene's memoir is structured as an account of her mother's and aunt's final days and the year that follows, a year in which Greene reconstructs her life as even the landscape around her shifts. Her home state of California has beautiful Santa Clara Valley's vast orchards dug up and paved over for tract housing, strip malls, and freeways-the valley is transformed to "Silicon." This becomes an apt parallel in a powerful story about family and home: what it means to have one, to lose one, never to have made one, and what, if anything, might take its place.
Greene's memoir is structured as an account of her mother's and aunt's final days and the year that follows, a year in which Greene reconstructs her life as even the landscape around her shifts. Her home state of California has beautiful Santa Clara Valley's vast orchards dug up and paved over for tract housing, strip malls, and freeways-the valley is transformed to "Silicon." This becomes an apt parallel in a powerful story about family and home: what it means to have one, to lose one, never to have made one, and what, if anything, might take its place.
Reviews / Votes
Missing Persons is a lyrical, deeply moving, fast-paced and emotionally powerful memoir. It speaks to many possible readers: to the recently bereaved, to daughters who have lost their mothers, to the generation of feminists who strove to forge new lives and identities out of the strictly prescribed roles for women in the 1950s, and to the ways we all struggle to re-ground ourselves and forge enduring bonds of friendship and family in the midst of loss. As a reader, I felt gripped throughout."" - Madelon Sprengnether, author of Great River Road: Memoir and Memory""Gayle Greene's Missing Persons is a compelling work. A powerful memoir of growing up in a California that we've lost, as technology has replaced orchards with internet servers, the book introduces us to a lively core family: two closely bonded sisters and the author herself, along with a charismatic but feckless father and a sweet but eventually depressive younger brother. Focusing in particular on the deaths of her mother and her aunt, Greene also recalls the best moments in her childhood, her parents' divorce, her father's adventures, and her brother's sorrowful suicide. Another theme is the writer's own evolution as a woman and an intellectual. The writing is vivid, passionate and yet disciplined, in many ways a tour de force. Hard to put down!"" - Sandra M. Gilbert, author of Wrongful Death: A Memoir
""When Gayle Greene suddenly becomes the last living member of her family, she finds herself yearning for a fuller understanding of the people she has lost--her complicated mother, her father who left the family decades earlier, and her brother who took his own life. In Missing Persons, Greene's attempt to untangle her knotty family history (while dealing with a house crammed with its detritus) becomes a remarkable act of exorcism, reconstruction, and epiphany. Missing Persons's mix of candor, humor, and wisdom will speak to anyone who has ever lost a loved one--as well as anyone who has a loved one to lose."" - Jean Hegland, author of Into the Forest
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Reno
United States
Illustrations
33 black & white photographs gallery
Dimensions
Height: 213 mm
Width: 137 mm
Thickness: 18 mm
Weight
295 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-943859-46-7 (9781943859467)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
10/2017
University of Nevada Press
€27.99
Available for download
Person
Gayle Greene is professor emerita at Scripps College in Claremont, California and is the author of several books.