"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
“...elegant, poetical…emotionally affecting… and despite the gravity of the subject, punctuated with lighthearted humor.”
--Kirkus Reviews
"...a stunner."
--Women's Studies
A "fascinating foray into loss, grief, and self-identity...Greene doesn't hold back. The emotional pain she shares in these chapters is real and raw, reminiscent of Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking." --Mary Potter Kenyon, Story Circle Book Reviews
I never intended to write a memoir. I didn’t like memoirs, I didn’t even read memoirs, until I found myself writing one. Stunned by the deaths of my mother and aunt, six weeks apart, I began reading every grief memoir I could lay hands on, every story about losing a parent, everything I could find about mothers and daughters. I never found one that addressed the issues I was struggling with.
It’s said that the loss of a parent is a rite of passage—but passage to where? and how? Most of the memoirs I read focused on death and ended with death, which wasn’t much help. But mine begins with the deaths, and asks, what now? How to find a way of mourning, of commemorating these lives and moving on in the absence of beliefs that might guide me through? As the professional identity on which I’d based my selfhood began to feel brittle and trivial, I was catapulted into questions of who am I, what have I done with my life?
Like many of my generation of "second wave" feminists, I’d been determined not to be my mother. I left home when I was barely 17, moved to New York, put a continent between us. But in the course of time, and with a job in California, I’d found a way back, and my mother and I became like… well, like mother and daughter. In ways much deeper than I’d realized, I’d counted on her and my aunt; the men left—my father had left years before, my brother committed suicide—but the women were bedrock, always there. Until they weren't.
Missing Persons tells a story so like what so many people go through that many readers have found themselves in this book: the harrowing health emergencies, the flailing about in search of help, dealing with doctors who are clueless about dying, dealing with medications that only make things worse, with a health care “system” so fiendishly complicated that it would be funny if it weren’t tragic, and the inexorable slide to the end. Then, figuring out a way to mourn that’s not scripted by belief systems of the past, patching together ways of grieving and letting go, a way for those of us who have no gods. Figuring out what to do with the ashes, how to make a memorial, what to do with the things—so many things! And the photos, decades of achingly beautiful photos of a family gone missing, a California gone missing.
This is not a sensationalist story. There's drama, but it's a familiar sort, the kinds of skeletons many families have rattling around in closets, suicide, depression, heartbreak, adultery. Nor is it a story about a woman who takes off for foreign countries to find a guru or a new man; the one I had turned out to be true. I found that the supports I'd built sustained me through these losses, friendships, a relationship, teaching, reading, writing; but I needed a way of seeing my life anew. There is something that goes missing when you lose a mother, the story of your life, the narrative threads that hold a life in place, or so it was for me. I needed a new story, which I found in the writing of this memoir.
Missing Persons writes a chapter in the unwritten history of Silicon Valley. You hear so much hype about this valley: the largest generator of wealth in the history of the planet, the high-tech center of the world. There’s so much money in this valley now, computers, electronics, microelectronics, semiconductors, telecommunications, video games, the internet, biotech, Venture Capitalists. But there is also a gap between rich and poor wider than anywhere in the country, and gridlock so colossal it gets reported in the New York Times. And there are 23 Superfund sites.
This tells the story of the valley from another side.
I grew up in the years the vast orchards were being dug up and paved over for tract housing, strip malls, freeways; the grinding of bulldozers and backhoes, the thud of tree trunks and branches as they hit the ground, the ratatatat of hammers as new developments sprang up and paved over the rich, dark soil of the valley —this was the soundtrack of my youth. It had been a place so paradisiacal that it was called the “Valley of Heart’s Delight”; people came from miles around, to marvel at its beauty in the spring. Behind our house was an apricot orchard, at the end of the block, a prune orchard which I’d walk through on my way to school. The ranch style house my father bought us when my parents split up in 1953 cost $14,000—that’s $124,000 in today’s dollars. You’d need three or four million to buy that house today— I kid you not.
You don’t have to be from Silicon Valley to have lived through this kind of loss of a place. The song that haunts me as I’m packing up my mother’s house and saying goodbye to the valley— they paved paradise and put up a parking lot— turns out not to have been written about California, as I’d assumed, but Hawaii. It’s a theme of our time.
“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
“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
Are you in book club? I’d be happy to visit. See "Book Club Resources" here.
Presentation at Scripps College
--Jean Hegland, author of Into the Forest
“...elegant, poetical…emotionally affecting… and despite the gravity of the subject, punctuated with lighthearted humor.”
--Kirkus Reviews
"...a stunner."
--Women's Studies
A "fascinating foray into loss, grief, and self-identity...Greene doesn't hold back. The emotional pain she shares in these chapters is real and raw, reminiscent of Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking." --Mary Potter Kenyon, Story Circle Book Reviews
I never intended to write a memoir. I didn’t like memoirs, I didn’t even read memoirs, until I found myself writing one. Stunned by the deaths of my mother and aunt, six weeks apart, I began reading every grief memoir I could lay hands on, every story about losing a parent, everything I could find about mothers and daughters. I never found one that addressed the issues I was struggling with.
It’s said that the loss of a parent is a rite of passage—but passage to where? and how? Most of the memoirs I read focused on death and ended with death, which wasn’t much help. But mine begins with the deaths, and asks, what now? How to find a way of mourning, of commemorating these lives and moving on in the absence of beliefs that might guide me through? As the professional identity on which I’d based my selfhood began to feel brittle and trivial, I was catapulted into questions of who am I, what have I done with my life?
Like many of my generation of "second wave" feminists, I’d been determined not to be my mother. I left home when I was barely 17, moved to New York, put a continent between us. But in the course of time, and with a job in California, I’d found a way back, and my mother and I became like… well, like mother and daughter. In ways much deeper than I’d realized, I’d counted on her and my aunt; the men left—my father had left years before, my brother committed suicide—but the women were bedrock, always there. Until they weren't.
Missing Persons tells a story so like what so many people go through that many readers have found themselves in this book: the harrowing health emergencies, the flailing about in search of help, dealing with doctors who are clueless about dying, dealing with medications that only make things worse, with a health care “system” so fiendishly complicated that it would be funny if it weren’t tragic, and the inexorable slide to the end. Then, figuring out a way to mourn that’s not scripted by belief systems of the past, patching together ways of grieving and letting go, a way for those of us who have no gods. Figuring out what to do with the ashes, how to make a memorial, what to do with the things—so many things! And the photos, decades of achingly beautiful photos of a family gone missing, a California gone missing.
This is not a sensationalist story. There's drama, but it's a familiar sort, the kinds of skeletons many families have rattling around in closets, suicide, depression, heartbreak, adultery. Nor is it a story about a woman who takes off for foreign countries to find a guru or a new man; the one I had turned out to be true. I found that the supports I'd built sustained me through these losses, friendships, a relationship, teaching, reading, writing; but I needed a way of seeing my life anew. There is something that goes missing when you lose a mother, the story of your life, the narrative threads that hold a life in place, or so it was for me. I needed a new story, which I found in the writing of this memoir.
Missing Persons writes a chapter in the unwritten history of Silicon Valley. You hear so much hype about this valley: the largest generator of wealth in the history of the planet, the high-tech center of the world. There’s so much money in this valley now, computers, electronics, microelectronics, semiconductors, telecommunications, video games, the internet, biotech, Venture Capitalists. But there is also a gap between rich and poor wider than anywhere in the country, and gridlock so colossal it gets reported in the New York Times. And there are 23 Superfund sites.
This tells the story of the valley from another side.
I grew up in the years the vast orchards were being dug up and paved over for tract housing, strip malls, freeways; the grinding of bulldozers and backhoes, the thud of tree trunks and branches as they hit the ground, the ratatatat of hammers as new developments sprang up and paved over the rich, dark soil of the valley —this was the soundtrack of my youth. It had been a place so paradisiacal that it was called the “Valley of Heart’s Delight”; people came from miles around, to marvel at its beauty in the spring. Behind our house was an apricot orchard, at the end of the block, a prune orchard which I’d walk through on my way to school. The ranch style house my father bought us when my parents split up in 1953 cost $14,000—that’s $124,000 in today’s dollars. You’d need three or four million to buy that house today— I kid you not.
You don’t have to be from Silicon Valley to have lived through this kind of loss of a place. The song that haunts me as I’m packing up my mother’s house and saying goodbye to the valley— they paved paradise and put up a parking lot— turns out not to have been written about California, as I’d assumed, but Hawaii. It’s a theme of our time.
“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
“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
Are you in book club? I’d be happy to visit. See "Book Club Resources" here.
Presentation at Scripps College
Here's a short piece about writing the memoir: "The Tape on the Cutting Room Floor"
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And here's a piece about mourning without markers in Psychology Today. And here's a review from Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. |
This video shows what the Santa Clara Valley once was, and how it became what it is. These are the memories that inform Missing Persons, the destruction of the orchards, the building of new houses and roads; watching this is for me like reliving my youth.