"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
I never intended to write a memoir. I didn’t like memoirs, I didn’t even read memoirs—until I found myself writing a memoir. Then I read every grief memoir I could find, 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.
I was walloped by the deaths of my aunt and mother, six weeks apart. It’s said that the loss of a parent is a rite of passage—but passage to where? and how? Most of the grief 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 commemorating my mother’s and aunt’s lives and deaths, of letting go and moving on, in the absence of beliefs that might guide me through? A way for those of us who have no gods. 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 stayed, bedrock, always there.
Missing Persons tells a story so familiar, so like what so many people go through that I think many readers will find themselves in this book: the harrowing health emergencies, the flailing about in search of help, dealing with medications that make things worse, with doctors who are clueless about death, with a health care “system” so tangled in red tape that it would be comic if it weren’t a nightmare; 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. Figuring out what to do with the ashes, how to make a memorial, what to do with the things—so many things! And what to do with the photos, decades of achingly beautiful photos of a family gone missing, a California gone missing.
This is not a sensationalist story, not an "I- was- sold- into- slavery," "born into the wrong body," "gang-raped," "left for dead" kind of story. There's drama enough in it, but it's a more familiar sort of drama, the sorts of skeletons many families have rattling around in closets, suicide, depression, 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 gold. In fact I found that the supports I'd built in my life sustained me now, friendships, a relationship, teaching, reading, writing. Gratitude is the word I’m looking for. A matter of seeing my life anew, finding a new story. That’s a big thing that goes missing when you go through major loss, the story of your life. You need a new story; I did, anyway. I never found a story like ours, in all the grief memoirs I read, which is why I wrote it.
And the setting, Silicon Valley--I never saw it written about as I have here. Mostly what you hear about the valley is hype: the largest generator of wealth in the history of the planet, the high-tech center of the world; if the valley were a nation it would be among the world’s dozen richest. Now it seems every place wants to be Silicon Valley. Well, be careful what you wish for.
It was 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. 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 smothered the rich, dark soil of the valley—this was the soundtrack of my youth. 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.
There’s so much money in this valley now, computers, electronics, microelectronics, semiconductors, telecommunications, video games, the internet, biotech, Venture Capitalists so rapacious as to be termed Vulture 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. You don’t have to be from Silicon Valley to have lived through this kind of loss. 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.
Missing Persons writes a chapter in the unwritten history of Silicon Valley.
“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
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
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
I never intended to write a memoir. I didn’t like memoirs, I didn’t even read memoirs—until I found myself writing a memoir. Then I read every grief memoir I could find, 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.
I was walloped by the deaths of my aunt and mother, six weeks apart. It’s said that the loss of a parent is a rite of passage—but passage to where? and how? Most of the grief 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 commemorating my mother’s and aunt’s lives and deaths, of letting go and moving on, in the absence of beliefs that might guide me through? A way for those of us who have no gods. 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 stayed, bedrock, always there.
Missing Persons tells a story so familiar, so like what so many people go through that I think many readers will find themselves in this book: the harrowing health emergencies, the flailing about in search of help, dealing with medications that make things worse, with doctors who are clueless about death, with a health care “system” so tangled in red tape that it would be comic if it weren’t a nightmare; 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. Figuring out what to do with the ashes, how to make a memorial, what to do with the things—so many things! And what to do with the photos, decades of achingly beautiful photos of a family gone missing, a California gone missing.
This is not a sensationalist story, not an "I- was- sold- into- slavery," "born into the wrong body," "gang-raped," "left for dead" kind of story. There's drama enough in it, but it's a more familiar sort of drama, the sorts of skeletons many families have rattling around in closets, suicide, depression, 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 gold. In fact I found that the supports I'd built in my life sustained me now, friendships, a relationship, teaching, reading, writing. Gratitude is the word I’m looking for. A matter of seeing my life anew, finding a new story. That’s a big thing that goes missing when you go through major loss, the story of your life. You need a new story; I did, anyway. I never found a story like ours, in all the grief memoirs I read, which is why I wrote it.
And the setting, Silicon Valley--I never saw it written about as I have here. Mostly what you hear about the valley is hype: the largest generator of wealth in the history of the planet, the high-tech center of the world; if the valley were a nation it would be among the world’s dozen richest. Now it seems every place wants to be Silicon Valley. Well, be careful what you wish for.
It was 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. 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 smothered the rich, dark soil of the valley—this was the soundtrack of my youth. 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.
There’s so much money in this valley now, computers, electronics, microelectronics, semiconductors, telecommunications, video games, the internet, biotech, Venture Capitalists so rapacious as to be termed Vulture 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. You don’t have to be from Silicon Valley to have lived through this kind of loss. 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.
Missing Persons writes a chapter in the unwritten history of Silicon Valley.
“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
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
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"
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.