Nobody Is Ever Missing

by Catherine Lacey

You can run all the way to New Zealand, but eventually you’ll catch up with yourself

Without telling her family, Elyria takes a one-way flight to New Zealand, abruptly leaving her stable but unfulfilling life in Manhattan. As her husband scrambles to figure out what happened to her, Elyria hurtles into the unknown, testing fate by hitchhiking, tacitly being swept into the lives of strangers, and sleeping in fields, forests, and public parks.

Her risky and often surreal encounters with the people and wildlife of New Zealand propel Elyria deeper into her deteriorating mind. Haunted by her sister’s death and consumed by an inner violence, her growing rage remains so expertly concealed that those who meet her sense nothing unwell. This discord between her inner and outer reality leads her to another obsession: If her truest self is invisible and unknowable to others, is she even alive?

The risks Elyria takes on her journey are paralleled by the risks Catherine Lacey takes on the page. In urgent, spiraling prose she whittles away at the rage within Elyria and exposes the very real, very knowable anxiety of the human condition. And yet somehow Lacey manages to poke fun at her unrelenting self-consciousness, her high-stakes search for the dark heart of the self. In the spirit of Haruki Murakami and Amelia Gray, Nobody Is Ever Missing is full of mordant humor and uncanny insights, as Elyria waffles between obsession and numbness in the face of love, loss, danger, and self-knowledge.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Mental Health, Novels, Mental Illness, Adult

258 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 8, 2014

About the author

Catherine Lacey is the author of five books: Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Pew, and Biography of X, as well as a story collection, Certain American States.

Her honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Lambda Award for Lesbian Fiction and the 2021 NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. She lives in México.

Reviews

[Orsodimondo · Rating 3 out of 5]

CERCANDO DI STARE DA SOLA


Copertina di Charlotte Strick.

Elyria ha quasi trent’anni e da sei è sposata con Charles, professore di matematica alla Columbia University. Lei è laureata e lavora per la CBS scrivendo sceneggiature di soap opera. Vivono nell’Upper West Side. Nessun problema di soldi, nessuno di salute.
La mamma di lei è sempre ubriaca. Probabilmente c’entra qualcosa il marito, il padre di Elyria: e probabilmente Lacey lo scrive da qualche parte, ma o me lo sono perso o l’ho rimosso. Sarà andato via e lei ha cominciato a bere? Oppure beve per quello che è successo a Ruby?
Ruby è la figlia adottiva, la sorella di Elyria, ex studentessa di matematica di Charles. Ruby si è suicidata, Elyria ha conosciuto Charles che le ha parlato della sua studentessa Ruby, poi le ha parlato di un tentato suicidio di sua madre, o di qualcosa di simile, il suicidio in famiglia li ha avvicinati, si sono sposati.
Sei anni dopo Elyria senza avvertire nessuno prepara uno zaino e parte per la Nuova Zelanda dove vive facendo lavori manuali, muovendosi con l’autostop, incontrando gente di cui non diventa mai amica.
Elyria è una donna in fuga, una donna che affonda, forse una donna in cerca di se stessa, è incapace di avvicinarsi alla parte veramente viva della vita.



E tante altre cose si potrebbero dire su questo esordio incensato dalla critica.
A me è venuta la seguente riflessione:

C’era una volta il cinema indipendente americano, che ha fatto storia, gioia e rivoluzione (come la Nouvelle Vague prima, e il Free Cinema prima).

Poi è arrivato il cinema indie, e le cose sono cambiate. Meno rivoluzione, e meno gioia.
Robert Redford ha le sue responsabilità (Sundance), ma a Robert io perdono tutto. E più di tutto.
Al Sundance meno.


I binari sono sempre vocativi. Anche quelli del tram. Se poi ci sono i piloni di una sopraelevata, il binomio è perfetto.

Il cinema indie si fa con pochi soldi, troupe ridotta e pochi mezzi, rigorosamente video, si impara a farlo facendolo, il regista scrive e monta e produce e se possibile fa anche la musica o la fotografia, si scava dentro, tira fuori tutto quello che sente nell’ombelico, cerca un’immagine triste e squallida, non dimentica di metterne almeno una di binari ferroviari, che sono sempre pregni di significato e significante… sembra il regno dell’EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) e del DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy)…

Comunque, fatto è che mi pare ormai si possa parlare di narrativa indie.

Piccole storie, non molti personaggi, mai eventi grossi, niente che non si possa racchiudere nell’arco di relazioni familiari di nuclei non numerosi (max quattro).


Perché la famiglia è ovviamente sempre al centro, le cose non cambiano, è il topos narrativo per eccellenza.
Ma la famiglia deve essere disfunzionale: madre depressa, padre violento, variante alcolizzata, sorella maggiore stuprata, se possibile un po’ di autolesionismo, leucemia o cancro aggiungono sempre la giusta nota dolente…
Siccome mentre descrivo la narrativa indie ho immagini di cinema indie, penso a protagonisti non secondo i classici canoni stilistici, decisamente non ‘belli’, occhiaie, barbe incolte (non quelle sexy curate), capelli sapientemente bisognosi di uno shampoo…
Il momento clou (il suicido della madre o della sorella, la mamma che ammazza il padre per autodifesa, un incidente mortale) viene sempre raccontato a spezzoni: prima un po’ di volte per far intuire cosa è successo, poi un po’ di volte a pezzetti per spiegare cosa è successo, finalmente raccontare come è successo, infine chiudere il cerchio e descrivere le conseguenze.
Il flashback impera. E stravince sul flashforward.
Il tutto si iscrive nel caso migliore nella categoria del carino: film carino, romanzo carino. Non bello.



Lacey immerge la sua scrittura nell’ironia, purtroppo però qualche volta si spinge nella barzelletta.

Non capisco perché questo libro venga inserito spesso nelle recensioni di romanzi con tema l’amore: in queste pagine l’amore è del tutto assente. Anche quello tra sorelle non sembra essere il sentimento dominante.
Elyria è soprattutto una persona che ha smarrito, e forse mai posseduto, l’empatia.
E, per carità, Joan Didion è lontana che più lontana non si potrebbe, cerchiamo di non bestemmiare.

La copertina è molto bella, opera della brava Charlotte Strick.



…non sarei mai scomparsa da me stessa, ed era questo che desideravo da tanto tempo, scomparire del tutto, ma non sarei mai riuscita a scomparire del tutto: non si scompare in quel modo, è un lusso che non è mai stato concesso a nessuno e nessuno potrà mai averlo.


Un’altra celebre copertina di Charlotte Strick.

[Claire · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wish I could remember how I heard about this book. It must have been from a blog, or...some list on goodreads, but I can't remember why on earth I thought I'd like it, besides the gorgeous cover art.

It's more depressing than The Bell Jar.

I'll say this, Catherine Lacey's debut novel went boldly into the spiral that is depression...I mean, really REALLY went there. The whole thing is very stream-of-consciousness - just like the mental verbal vomit that comes along with having a breakdown. In a literary sense, it's an interesting choice. I'll admit, there was some beautiful language, and some thought-provoking points. But for me, it was just too dark. I longed for the protagonist Elyria to buoy herself, to bounce up for air. I kept reading and hoping against hope.

I'm frustrated (and surprised) that I made it through the whole book. Good thing it was short. I personally just didn't enjoy it. It was definitely poignant, and written in a unique (although sometimes offputting)style - so for that, and its honesty, I'll give it 2 stars. If you're dealing with a relentless depression, it's the kind of book that might make you feel like you're not alone, but it also might just send you over the edge.

[Cecily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Run away, find yourself, start afresh?

This starts off with 28-year old Elyria attempting such an adventure, but it becomes darker and more introspective as the tragic backstory bleeds into her present and future. It reminded me of an oft-repeated fable from my housemistress:

A longstanding resident baked cakes for two new families, as was tradition. She took the cakes, introduced herself, and welcomed them to the village.

The first family were full of smiles and gladly invited her in. They were relieved to have left their previous place: everyone there was unfriendly, gossipy, selfish, and generally unpleasant. The baker sympathised, but warned them that they’d find the same was true in this village.

The second family were polite but more subdued. They were heartbroken to have left their previous place: a warm, friendly community, where everyone looked out for each other. The baker smiled and reassured them that they’d find the same was true in this village.

Image: Woman’s feet on steps into a lake, captioned “Should I stay or should I go?” (Source)

Elyria realises that no matter where she goes:
“I could never be missing to myself, I could never delete my own history”
“Running from something isn’t freedom.”
The fable, and now this story, rein me in and tie me down. Perhaps they shouldn’t.

Slippery wandering and wondering

“My husband was a song that I had forgotten the words to and I was a fuzzy photograph of someone he used to love.”
Elyria, named after a town her mother never even visited, buys a one-way ticket from New York to New Zealand. She doesn’t leave a note for her husband or mother. All three are linked by losing someone to suicide, and Elyria and her nameless (for most of the book) husband grew up with alcoholic mothers and absent fathers.
“It was possible that I was not in love with a person but a person-shaped hole.”

Hitchhiking alone, she’s given advice, works out more, but largely ignores it.
“You must seem both harmless and able, if necessary, to push a knife through any tender gut.”
She has no particular plans beyond turning up at the farm of a writer she once met who had vaguely invited her to visit.

Although it starts off breezily, Elyria’s frequent observations about people’s faces and her musings about what happens to blood samples are not quite normal.
“The flesh hung on his face like it was clay pressed on in a rush.”

There are hints of synaesthesia, with colours, keys, and chords recurring in her rambling analogies.
“It’s like you’ve turned into a color or a sound… no harmony, no pattern, no sense, no order.”
And then there’s the wildebeest inside, that she wants to suppress or express, or maybe just tame.

Image: A zebra, patterned with a maze, saying to a regular zebra, “I’m trying to find myself”, by Steph. (Source)

Quotes

• “He was looking at me like I was a very nice thing of his that wasn’t working quite like it should.” [Her husband, on their honeymoon.]

• “I needed to live in some other story for a half hour.”

• “Childhood was a movie I’d only seen the previews to.”

• “I was a human non-sequitur - senseless and misplaced.”

• “She had skin the texture of cheap toilet paper and luminous green eyes, little luxury items planted in her skull.”

• “Pointless hills rippling around us - the trees all captive to the ground, a grey mountain in the distance, stoic and bored.”

• “Memories are so often made by one hand and deleted by the other.”

• “I wasn’t lost because I no longer had a destination.”

See also

• Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost is a beautiful and unsettling collection of pieces about distance, separation, and loss, so you can find yourself. I wrote two very different reviews: a poetic response, HERE, and a more conventional review HERE.

• A very different take on hitchhiking and its risks, but one that also features a character a world away from the land they know, is Michel Faber’s Under the Skin, which I reviewed HERE.

• Hemingway’s very short story, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, which I reviewed HERE, touches on suicide, but in a more elliptical way.

• Elyria is reading Mrs. Bridge by Evan S Connell, about a suburban woman struggling with ennui and the expectations of others, and in which someone dies by suicide.

• The only other Lacey book I’ve read so far is more about being found than lost: Pew, which I reviewed HERE.

[Lindy Loo · Rating 1 out of 5]

UPDATE: This book annoyed me in every which way. I hated the narrator and wanted to just smack her and tell her to get over herself already. And sorry, Catherine Lacey, but run-on sentences used to indicate a spiraling/disintegration of a person's mental state is like the oldest and most tiresome damn trick in the book. "Urgent, spiraling prose" my ass.

Am still working on this but having a really hard time finding the narrator/main character anything but whiny and self-absorbed, which is making it really difficult to get through because whenever I have actual time to read, I find myself thinking: Dammit, do I really wanna sit down and listen to this chick wallow some more?

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

5+
This is a startlingly good debut novel. The writing is crisp and assured and, in the rambling internal monologue narrative style, Lacey pulls off the sort of trick that most established writers couldn't hope to achieve. Elyria is the sort of character who speaks to a type of reader, a type of human being, and while she might infuriate some... I think everyone needs to have respect, understanding, dare-I-say patience with Elyria and with any folks in the reader's life who might suffer similarly. This world can be impossibly difficult to deal with in the best of circumstances - so if someone needs to step off the merry-go-round for a little while, it's wrong to attack them for it. It's wrong not to try to understand or allow it. Nobody is ever missing, not to themselves - it might just take a little while to understand where you are.

A lot more, some of it really rather personal, at RB: http://ragingbiblioholism.com/2014/07...

[jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

i wanted to create a shelf for this one. i would have called "how-the-young'uns-write." but then i faltered. it seemed dismissive. maybe there is something slightly MFA-ish and a bit "trendy" about the way this book is written, but, really, this is beautiful, brave, and virtuoso writing, and it should be judged as its own writerly thing.

elyria, the protagonist, is a very young 28 year old. she speaks (writes) in lulling run-ons that are often startling and beautiful, and sometimes so poetic and original they make your heart sing. sometimes they are hilarious and then you laugh. she writes of all the things young'uns with broken hearts, a truncated view of their future, and a disembodied desperation write: time, relationships, parents, siblings, love, not love, the big wide world with its big wide being-lost-in-ness, and death.

(MINOR SPOILER THAT GETS REVEALED SOON ENOUGH) elyria's particular relationship to time, death, and disembodiment is connected to the death of her sister ruby. (END OF SPOILER) since elyria talks mostly from a place of disconnection and inner sense-making rather than story-telling, we don't learn much about her life prior to the present of the narration, but we learn enough to understand that it wasn't pretty. she doesn't tell us a lot about what she was like as a child, but you get a sense she was one of those kids who thought all the time about dying. you know those kids. they are the heroes of the literature you love best. my favorite are mick kelley, frankie addams, holden caulfield, and nomi nickel.* if you can imagine mick, frankie, and holden at 28, you get elyria.

it takes a really good writer to pull off a mick, a frankie, a holden, a nomi. the despair of children is not for the faint of heart.

fact is, some of us carry those children inside us all of our lives. we manage to survive by learning to love them. cuz those children are too formidable, too unbelievably cool to go away. what loss that would be! so we make peace with them and their deathlust the best we can. we become the mommies and daddies who weren't there or weren't enough, and, as snotchcheez says (i'll paraphrase), we take 'em home and give them a warm blanket and a bowl of chowder. for life.

*honestly, it's just as hard to choose among the unbelievable characters of Miriam Toews as it is to choose among those of Carson McCullers -- which is why i didn't.

[T.D. Whittle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a real love-it-or-hate-it kind of book, and I could go into all the reasons why I fall on the love side but instead, I'll just say that I began reading after dinner and did not stop until I'd finished at one a.m.

I would like to add one complaint, though, that is not about the book but about some readers' reviews. This book is not a straightforward coming-of-age tale and some of the condescending comments made about young people grousing on about young people concerns and such nonsense turns my stomach. This novel does feature a young(ish) woman though, at twenty-eight, she is not young enough for it to be a true bildungsroman. She is nothing like Holden Caulfield or any of our more famous American-teen-lit antiheroes.

Nobody Is Ever Missing is first and foremost about a woman thrown into a complete tailspin by the suicide of her most intimate loved one. It is about how the lives of those left behind are hollowed out like a gourd and rendered meaningless by that one violent act so that their sense of purpose must be reconsidered and reclaimed, breath by breath. It is about how drowning people grab onto the first person or thing that looks like a life saver. It is about how profound trauma can drop-kick a human being outside the parameters of the known world and make them question their own sanity.

Nobody Is Ever Missing is also darkly funny and self-mocking and irreverent, rather than unrelentingly and intensely earnest. It is in no way cloying. I wonder if many readers failed to grasp this about Lacey's tone? In short, the book deserves much higher praise and less condescension than it's receiving from some Goodreads members. But then if you have never experienced traumatic loss due to suicide and mental health problems, perhaps it made no sense to you at all. I only regret that it's being written off as simply another "coming of age" tale. It is not that. It is so much more.

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I was a human non sequitur—senseless and misplaced, a bad joke, a joke with no place to land.”

This novel starts with a woman leaving home. You’ll like it if you can engage with the only main character, twenty-eight-year-old Elyria (named after a town in Ohio that her mother never visited). She abruptly leaves her comfortable life in Manhattan, and her job as a CBS soap opera writer, and her husband, a math professor. They had both experienced a similar tragedy that stripped their souls, and for that they bonded—and, for that, Elyria couldn’t take it any more, after six years.

“I want to be that person, part of a respectable people, but I also want nothing to do with being people, because to be people is to be breakable…”

Elyria takes off for New Zealand, without even giving a heads up to her husband. She is seeking, searching, for her truest self, and attempting to unscramble the cognitive dissonance between her outer and inner selves. She senses what she calls the wildebeest in her, caught between two impulses of wanting to be here in love and wanting to walk away like it never happened. Her way of thinking is often circuitous and epigrammatic, such as “…and it seems the wildebeest was what was wrong with me, but I wasn’t entirely sure of what was wrong with the wildebeest.” This strain of opposites and paradox filled out Elyria’s psyche and also made her feel shriveled.

There isn’t really a plot, but there is certainly a journey—a journey through many remote, farmland areas of New Zealand as Elyria tempts fate by hitchhiking, and the inner stream of consciousness that is her thoughts and feelings.

“I looked back at him like I didn’t have any trouble to tell because that’s my trouble, I thought, not knowing how to tell it…”

So Elyria tells us her story, her journey, the recursive thoughts, the pain from her former tragedy; the inability to deal with loss, the pain of being with her husband and the pain of being without him, the loneliness of being without people and the loneliness of being with them.

I felt that I was walking through a surreal landscape, dreamscape, pain-scape, like a cemetery of Elyria’s heart, buffered by her poetic and melancholy soul. Occasionally, it was bleakly witty, but always there was a tugging on my spirit, the knottiness and heaviness of this woman and her loss. Lacey’s debut novel was open, vulnerable, a dark glass. She captures the fragility of the human condition; I hope her next effort will carry it further, to more expansive connections. Don’t look for redemption here.

“…to love someone is to know that one day you’ll have to watch them break unless you do first…”

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh wow I loved this book. And I'm not even entirely sure why. There isn't much plot there is really only one main character and she is annoying at times. She pretty much has everything but she walks away from it all without telling anyone where she is going. What follows is her journey to try and get back to herself. This book contains some of my favorite sentences and steam of consciousness paragraphs that I have ever read. This one won't be for everybody and it probably won't be on a lot of best of lists but it hit the right chord at the right time for me. One of my favorites for 2014.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I meant was I knew I had to do something that I didn't know how to do, which was leaving the adult way, the grown-up way, stating the problem, filling out the paperwork, doing all those adult things, but I knew that wasn't the whole problem, that I didn't just want a divorce from my husband, but a divorce from everythiing, to divorce my own history; I was being pushed by currents, by unseen things, memories and imaginations and fears swirled together - this was one of those things you figure out years later but it's not the kind of thing you can explain to an almost stranger in a broom closet while you're mostly drunk and you barely know where you are or why you are there or why some people can smell secrets.

Nobody is Ever Missing was the 2015 debut of Catherine Lacey, taking its title from the poem Dream Song 29 by John Berryman.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

The novel opens with the first person narrator, in her late twenties, Elyria (named after a town her mother than never visited) arriving in New Zealand. 36 hours earlier she had waited until her husband went to work, then walked out of their marital home in the US, with only a small rucksack, the novel “Mrs. Bridge,” by Evan Connell, and some traveller's cheques, and made this journey, which she had planned in secret.

Her planned destination is the farm of a poet at the other end of the country, someone she met in New York at a reading of his work and who made a vague offer of accomodation if she ever happened to be in the country, and she has no plan of how to get there other than hitchhiking.

A woman wearing a backpack, a cardigan, green sneakers. And young-seeming, of course, because you must seem young to get away with this kind of vulnerability, standing on a road’s shoulder, showing the pale underside of your arm. You must seem both totally harmless and able, if necessary, to push a knife through any tender gut.
...
This looked like the beginning of a porno or slasher movie and I didn’t want to be slashed or porned, but I did need to get about a hundred miles west of this parking lot and the sun was nearly setting and this car was the only one making an offer and I have always been unable to decline anyone’s offer of almost anything.

As she travels across the country she meets various people - some fleeting encounters in their cars or trucks, others she stays with longer, although she usually ends up walking out without saying goodbye - and we gradually piece together parts of her back story (the early parts of the novel reminded me of Cusk's Outline, although we gradually learn rather more of Elyria than we did of Cusk's narrator).

Her sister Ruby, the same age, was adopted; she comments how in pictures of when her mother brings Ruby home she is smiling, whereas in pictures of when she was brought home from hospital, her mother looks as if she'd been beaten up then someone handed her a baby. Ruby was Korean by birth, and a straight-A student specialising in maths - overly conscious that she is a cliche:

She was talking, I thought, about how predictable she felt - I'm Asian so I'm supposed to be good at math and skip grades and I did and I'm adopted so I'm supposed to be messed up and I am - and I tried to tell her she wasn't predictable, she wasn't a cliche.

Six years before the novel begins, Ruby, aged 22, committed suicide: I have never really stopped thinking of how the smartest person I knew had, after much thought, decided that life was not worth it—that she’d be better off not living—and how was I supposed to live after that?

The last person to see her alive was a maths professor - Ruby was his teaching assistant - and first meets him in the police station when Ruby's body is discovered. Rather to her mother's horror - who sees this as both parties avoiding acknowledging Ruby has gone and laments the ten year age gap - the two soon marry (although her alcoholic mother's own marriage, now ended, to a plastic surgeon, is hardly an ideal to follow).

At times Elyria feels content for the first time in her life, but she is unable to settle into the marriage - she refers to the 'wildebeest' inside her (with shades of Steve Peter's Chimp) - and her husband also has his own dark side (he is still haunted by his own mother's suicide and prone to unconscious nocturnal rages).

Elyria herself works as a writer for soap operas, and at times she feels as if she is acting the script of being a normal person. She and her husband (who from what we see of him has the autistic tendencies often associated with mathematicians) often talk about the 'derstandable' aspects of each other and life in general - things that are, to them, un-understandable.

He was looking at me like I was a very nice thing of his that wasn’t working quite like it should, like he’d found a defect, a defect that was extremely disappointing because he had spent a lot of time doing his research.

Eventually the 'wildebeest' compels her to leave that perfectly nice apartment and absolutely suitable job and routines and husband who didn’t do anything completely awful which is where the novel begins.

Elyria eventually arrives at the poet's house, at around the novel's halfway point, and stays with him, rather to his bemusement for some months, until he throws her out, You are a sad person, he said, and I’m not a person who can tolerate other people’s sadness, and also pushing back on her own view that she wants to be alone, saying rather she wants to be with people physically, just emotionally distant from them.

New Zealand forms a rather odd backdrop to the story: a country where people claim to be happy, the country peaceful and there is plenty of space and nature to enjoy, but Elyria is rather cynical about the natural wonders (a boring little mountain, a plain blue lake, a gas station, the same as ours only slightly not), those she meets often have issues of their own, and the locals frequently admonish her for her naivety in assuming it is safe to hitchhike as a lone woman (I thought if I heard someone call me brave one more time I might rip off my own thumb and not even bother to stop the blood from staining their upholstery).

After she is again challenged, this time at a commune where she has found refuge, for her lack of belonging, she comes to a revelation that what she is really trying to escape from is herself, and that nobody is ever missing from themselves:

I realised that if no one ever found me, and even if lived out the rest of my life here, always missing, forever a missing person to other people, I could never be missing to myself, I could never delete my own history, I would always know exactly where I was and where I had been and I would never wake up not being who I was and it didn't matter how much or how little I thought I understood the mess of myself, because I would never, no matter what I did, be missing to myself and that was what I had wanted all this time, to go fully missing, but I would never be able to go fully missing - nobody is missing like that, no one ever had that luxury, and no one ever will.

And in the later part of the novel, after suffering an accident she is forced to confront the reality of her situation.

In a 2018 interview the author commented on her influences: https://theadroitjournal.org/2018/09/...

I'm not sure I totally believed in Elyria, and particularly her husband and sister, as characters, nor the New Zealand setting, as all seemed rather stylised, but I'm equally not sure that mattered.

SR: You once described yourself as a “spongy” writer, someone who absorbs and inadvertently mimics the styles of other writers. What writers do you feel spongiest toward? When you notice this foreign voice in your work, do you let it stay, or do you mute that voice in the next draft?

CL: You must learn to use that sponginess as a tool, I feel. If a writer does this to you, you must only read them when you want to use their voice as a direct influence on a particular work. I think I contracted a mental virus from Thomas Bernhard about ten years ago and I still work around the scar tissue. He’s a dangerous one. And my partner has noticed that often when I complain about something it often comes out sounding like a Lydia Davis story. (Representative complaints: You’re often walking a few paces ahead of me; The bird you pointed out flew away before I could see it; We cannot understand why everyone dislikes our friend Margaret.) Davis has completely colonized a part of my brain, and I think she’s brilliant so it’s fine with me.

The voice this most reminded of was Helen Patty Yumi Cottrell's (later) novel Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, with the same sense of Bernhard influenced, but very different in style, black humour as well as psychological insight into a troubled life.

4 stars - and a novel I appreciated (even) more than her more recent novel Pew.

[Mary Meghan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book so much. Once I got used to the stream of consciousness writing and excessively long run-on sentences, I really appreciated the color of the writing. Certain aspects of the writing were beautiful. However, the plot leaves much to be desired. I kept waiting for something to happen. But nothing ever really happened.

[macarena · Rating 2 out of 5]

*Nunca falta nadie, de Catherine Lacey, parte de una premisa que podría ser interesante y que, de hecho, en conjunto con su portada, fue lo que me hizo descargar el libro y comenzarlo casi de inmediato: Elyria, una mujer neoyorquina que parece tener una vida estable (un matrimonio, un trabajo, una rutina), de pronto lo abandona todo y se marcha a Nueva Zelanda sin avisar ni dejar explicaciones. Allí empieza a vagar de un lugar a otro, sin rumbo fijo, aceptando pequeños trabajos, pidiendo alojamiento a desconocidos y hablando lo mínimo posible. El supuesto motor de la historia es este viaje: ¿por qué huyó? ¿qué busca? ¿qué descubrirá en ese recorrido?
El problema es que, en la práctica, la novela nunca desarrolla esas preguntas. Lo que podría haber sido una trama de autodescubrimiento o de huida existencial queda reducido a un monólogo interior caótico y fragmentado. Elyria no narra una historia en sentido estricto: improvisa. Cada capítulo parece escrito sin plan, como si la protagonista (y la autora) se dejaran llevar por pensamientos sueltos, sin preocuparse por la coherencia o la dirección. ¿Podría decirse que este caos narrativo es el reflejo del caos interno del personaje? Funcionaría ese argumento en una novela donde dicho caos llegara a un climax, a una respuesta, una novela y una protagonista con sentido. No es el caso aquí.
La voz de Elyria se convierte en un flujo de conciencia repetitivo y agotador. No hay un arco narrativo claro, no sabemos si su comportamiento responde a un trastorno mental, a una depresión, a un trauma o simplemente a la decisión de mantener a la protagonista en la penumbra. Se hace mención de la muerte de su hermana, pero, está tan mal trabajada que esa perdida no pareciera justificar dedicar toda una novela para ese viaje innecesario.
Su protagonista no transmite empatía (en ningún caso creo que un personaje deba transmitirle eso al lector), pero tampoco resulta simpática o un poco interesante. Cuando los demás personajes le preguntan el porqué de sus acciones, básicamente porque necesita alguien hacerse cargo de su existencia y seguridad, se muestra arisca, culpa al resto y encuentra errores en todos menos en ella misma.
Esa falta de definición no transmite misterio, sino vacío: da la sensación de que ni la narradora ni la autora sabían qué querían contar.
Tampoco aprovecha utilizar un lugar geográfico nuevo como destino. Más allá de repetir un montón de veces que Elyria hace autostop en el camino dentro de Nueva Zelanda, ninguna descripción sirve para que el lector se sienta parte de su viaje.
El estilo —con frases largas, divagaciones y ambigüedades— puede parecer experimental, pero a mí me resultó confuso y poco atractivo. En vez de sugerir profundidad, la ambigüedad se vuelve un refugio para no tomar decisiones narrativas. Al final del libro, Elyria vuelve casi al mismo punto en que empezó, y lo único que queda es una frustración creciente: no hubo transformación, no hubo revelación, no hubo desenlace.
Lo que podría haber sido un relato potente sobre el desarraigo y la fuga se queda en un ejercicio de improvisación literaria. El viaje de Elyria se siente estancado desde el inicio hasta el cierre, y la circularidad del final no hace más que confirmar esa sensación de vacío.
Le pongo dos estrellas porque, aunque tiene pasajes que subrayé, como novela me pareció repetitiva, errática y, en última instancia, fallida.
Agradecí cuando llegué a la última página y pude cerrarlo para no volver a él nunca más.

[Roya · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️

《بعض از آدم‌ها باعث می‌شوند انسان‌تر شويم و بعضی باعث می‌شوند كم‌تر احساس انسان بودن كنیم و اين واقعیت است، همان‌قدر كه نیروی جاذبه واقعی است و شايد راه‌هایی برای اثباتش باشد اما وجودش مهم‌تر از اثباتش است. چگونه ممكن است غريبه‌اى از راه برسد و نگاهت کند و باعث شود احساس كنى براى خودت و دنيا معناى بیشترى داری‌، حتى اگر چنين احساسی به شدت شكننده باشد و فقط گاهی پیدا شود و آماده‌ى پریشانی و ناپدید شدن باشد. مهم این است كه گاهی حس بين دو نفر شكل می‌گیرد؛ نمی‌دانم تصادفی است یا منطقی دارد، نمی‌دانم چه تركيبی از آدم‌ها براي اين منظور در كارند و چرا و چگونه آن‌ها را پیدا می‌کنیم و در کنارمان نگه‌شان می‌داریم و نمی‌دانم همه‌ی این‌ها بر پایه‌ی نظم است یا آشفتگی ولی احساس می‌کنم آشفتگی است بنابراین فرض می‌کنم همین است که هست.》

《ما همه‌مان گاهی می‌خواهیم بگذاريم برویم، انگار هرگز اتفاقی نیفتاده است. کسى در جهان نیست كه از من بخواهد بين این دو خواسته زندگی كنم؟ بين ميل به گذاشتن و رفتن، انگار هرگز اتفاقی نیفتاده، و ميل به خوب بودن در عشق، دوست داشتن و دوست داشته شدن، منطقی بودن، فقط خوب بودن؟ می‌خواهم چنين آدمی باشم، دلم می‌خواهد جزو انسان‌هاى احترام‌برانگیز باشم، ولى از طرفى هم نمی‌خواهم درگیر انسان بودن بشوم، چون انسان بودن يعنى شکنندگی، دانستن اين كه شكستنت در راه است و به زودى خواهی شكست، شاید اصلا همین امروز، هممن لحظه، همين دم هواپیمایی از آسمان بيفتد و نابودت کند يا ساختمانى كه در آن زندگی می‌کنی فرو بريزد و تو یا کسی را كه عاشقش هستی بکشد و عاشق کسى بودن يعنى دانستن این كه روزی مجبورى شکستنش را تماشا كنى مگر آن كه خودت زودتر بشكنى وعاشق كسی بودن يعنى بی‌گمان بشکنی، و عشق کسی بودن یعنی بی‌گمان آن عشق را رفته‌رفته از دست بدهی، با خستگی یا انباشته شدن نفرتی عفونی، یا به سرعت، با تصادف یا پیشامدی عجیب و غریب یا باکتری گوشت‌خواری که کسی نمی‌داند از کجا آمده‌. از دستش می‌دهی و همه فقط می‌گویند چه آدم خوش‌قیافه‌ای بود، افسوس... و جانور درونت، جانور درون هر انسانی، فقط می‌خواهد از شرّ همه‌چیز خلاص شود چون نمی‌تواند سختی پرسه‌زنی در دنیا را تاب بیاورد، جوری که انگار تا ابد ناچاریم به این کار ادامه بدهیم.》

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

The woman started laughing and laughing and laughing so much I felt like I had to laugh, too, so I did and then I realized we were laughing at how her husband was dead, which really didn’t seem so funny, and I think we realized that at the same time, and we both stopped laughing and there was that deeply quiet moment after two people have laughed too much and we let that quiet moment stay for the rest of the drive. During that silence I thought of that night when my husband and I were having one of the arguments about the way we argue and I went into the kitchen to get a glass of water but instead picked up a knife because I was thinking about stabbing myself in the face—not actually considering stabbing myself in the face, but thinking that it would be a physical expression of how I felt—and I picked up a chef’s knife, our heavy good one that I used for everything from cutting soft fruit to impaling pumpkins and I looked at it, laughed a noiseless laugh, put the chef’s knife down, poured myself a glass of water, and drank it fast, until I choked a little, and I went back to arguing with my husband and he didn’t know about my face-stabbing thoughts and it made me even angrier that he didn’t know about my face-stabbing thoughts, that he couldn’t just intuit these things, look into my eyes and know that the way he spoke to me was a plain waste of our life—but here in the car with the widowed stranger I didn’t have to feel any of those feelings anymore because I had left my husband and our arguments and my chef’s knife and I had come to this country where I could laugh, so gently, gently laugh at things that were actually not funny.

***

You know when you read a book, and you admire the work on a technical level, for what it is and what you think it sets out to do, but still dislike nearly every moment of the experience?

Yeah. I hate when that happens, too. Bear with me here.

I really wanted to like Catherine Lacey’s Nobody is Ever Missing. I wanted to, I just… didn’t. Beyond the simply gorgeous cover, I was intrigued by the novel’s premise: one day, twenty-eight-year-old Elyria Marcus buys a one-way ticket from New York to New Zealand and, when the opportunity arises, abandons her husband of six years and everything she’s ever known. Her destination once in New Zealand is the remote farm of a well-respected poet named Werner, whom she has only met once but is invited to pay a visit to, should she desire a break from modern civilization.

However, there’s a great deal more to Elyria than mere wanderlust. At first blush her life is rather remarkable: a Barnard graduate, she lives in Manhattan’s Upper West Side; her husband (whom she only ever refers to as Husband or the professor, which goes a terrific distance in dehumanizing him) is a tenured associate professor of mathematics at Columbia University; and for five years she has made her living working as a writer for CBS.

But there’s another layer to Elyria, and it has a name: Ruby.

Ruby was Elyria’s adopted Korean sister. More than that, Ruby was a child prodigy. And to go a step even further, Ruby was the TA for the professor Elyria would one day marry. And how did Elyria and the professor meet? Naturally, while dealing with the immediate aftermath of Ruby’s on-campus suicide.

So yeah, a bit of an unconventional situation, emotionally speaking.

But to dig through to an even deeper layer, there’s something wrong with Elyria herself—something that’s been there all her life, though it is never given direct designation. She dubs it “the wildebeest.” It’s the name she’s given the darkness of her own mind, which, as is evident in the segment posted at the beginning of this review, is volatile and potentially dangerous—to Elyria, and possibly to others, too. It’s what keeps her from connecting to anyone else, from feeling any sort of remorse or regret about the life she’s left behind and those who may or may not be searching for her. More than anything, though, it’s what keeps her moving forward.

Throughout the novel, the reader is privy to the never-ending internal battle between Elyria and the wildebeest, which at times feels most prominently rooted in sociopathic tendencies (the ability to shut off all concern for others and focus only one oneself, for example). However, as the novel progresses it becomes clear that while yes, there is something “off” inside of Elyria, it’s been fostered, in a sense, by a number of outside factors: a mother who was never really “there” and who always prized Ruby as the favourite child; a husband who admonishes her like a child and asks “Don’t you have something to say?” when she’s done something wrong; and a life that has never quite felt like hers.

Gradually we see more and more how Elyria has learned to fake her way through life, enacting whatever emotions are necessary for a given situation—learning how to say the right things to get people to pass her by without them wanting to pry too much into her life. But it’s when she’s faced with feeling genuine emotions, especially while hitchhiking her way through the New Zealand countryside, that Lacey’s approach is most effective and Elyria’s inner monologue becomes an almost panicked stream of consciousness, where one thought dovetails into another, and words and phrases are repeated as if her mind is stuttering over new sensory information.

This is the true central conflict within Nobody is Ever Missing. Elyria is not at war with her husband, or her mother, or even the memory of long-dead Ruby. She’s locked in a battle with herself and the horrible things she knows deep down she is capable of. But it’s not the violent thoughts she sometimes has that are the problem; it’s losing control, allowing any emotions to break through for fear of what might also step into the spotlight. And it’s because of this oppressive control—deliberately enacted or simply a part of her—that Elyria faces her current crisis of self: not knowing who she really is or what, if anything, she wants out of life.

Lacey’s writing reflects this conflict not just in the stream-of-consciousness-style noted earlier, but also through the use of italics in place of quotation marks when denoting speech. And while this is an effective tactic in the sense that it visibly filters everything through the narration, which belongs exclusively to Elyria, it also casts a chill over the entirety of the narrative. Even Jaye, who Elyria meets in Wellington, and is about the one bright and shiny personality in this whole book, is deadened by the visibly emotionless writing. I’m sure this all sounds fantastically nit-picky on my part, but it’s a genuine issue I have—feeling invested in a narrative to the same degree when the dialogue is handled in such a manner. I feel it mutes the content in an unfortunate way.

As effective as Lacey’s tactics are in conveying Elyria’s mental and emotional state, they are also what inevitably sunk this novel for me. Put bluntly, it’s exhausting spending any amount of time with Elyria. The novel is relatively short—just 250 slight pages—but I found I was only able to read in fits and spurts, as Elyria’s clinical demeanour and marathon-like chains of thought quickly wore me down every time I picked up the book anew.

The more time I spent with Nobody is Ever Missing, seemingly trapped in Elyria’s mind, the more I felt I was living with an alien species that did not yet understand herself, let alone the humanity surrounding her. And in her coolness, I found I lost the ability to empathize with her journey, or for that matter any part of her personality. From beginning to end, Elyria Marcus remained, to me, a mystery I wasn’t sure I wanted to solve.

[Annelies · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful, poetical, introspective, sad but also laughable. I felt so sorry for Elyria. But the style in which everything is told, is sometimes so funny and at the point that it makes you see the self-relevation of Elyria. Nothing is perfect and we have to accept things as they come.

[Abas Azimi · Rating 3 out of 5]

داستان درباره الیریا هست که زندگی و همسرش رو توی نیویورک ول می‌کنه و میره نیوزلند تا خودش رو گم کنه!
داستان کند پیش میره و افسرده کننده هست. البته اذیت کننده نیست. یه جاهایی با شخصیت همراه می‌شدم و کاملا درکش می‌کردم. این ایده که آدم بدون اینکه بمیره بره و گم بشه خیلی جذاب و وسوسه برانگیزه!
این اواخر خیلی فیلم دیدم و کتاب خوندم که شخصیت‌ها با تروما درگیر بودن. احساس می‌کنم استفاده از تروما توی شخصیت پردازی به نوعی مد شده. حالا گاهی خوب از کار در میاند و گاهی هم بد. نمونه خوبی که این اواخر خوندم الینور آلیفنت بود. هیچکس هرگز گم نمی‌شود نمونه معمولی این نوع داستان هست.

[Jessica Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never read Eat, Pray, Love (and have no desire to), but I get the feeling this book is sort of the antithesis of it and other feel-good books about women finding themselves.

Without telling anyone, Elyria abruptly leaves her husband and her normal Manhattan life behind, traveling across the world to New Zealand to escape and isolate herself from the monotony and melancholy she has grown to resent, as well as her unresolved grief following her sister's suicide.

In New Zealand, she engages in a series of reckless behaviors: hitchhiking with strangers, sleeping in abandoned sheds in the middle of nowhere, and ultimately landing herself under psychiatric evaluation.

Consumed by feelings of dread, anxiety and apathy, Elyria self-consciously exposes the darkness that lies deep inside of her, meditating on her own innate wildness. There's this sense throughout that she wants to want the decent, normal life from which she has estranged herself, but knows ultimately the futility of this. Perhaps the biggest tragedy of all though is seeing her come to terms with the fact that no matter how far she slips away from her old life, she will never escape herself.

Told in first-person stream-of-consciousness prose, Nobody Is Ever Missing is a haunting, surreal portrait of a woman in the midst of a personal crisis. Lacey's writing is lyrical and poetic; I found myself dog-earring multiple breathtaking passages and lingering on her stunning, powerful writing.

[Claire · Rating 3 out of 5]

VEEEEEERY introspective novel about the narrator’s mental unravelling as she steps out of her everyday life. There were some really insightful moments where Lacey had interesting things to say about grief and how it makes us behave particularly in our relationships. However, the narrative just didn’t really hang together for me. I found it difficult to keep track of timeframes, and the protagonist didn’t invite my empathy in spite of her deeply challenging experiences. This one didn’t quite fire for me.

[Snotchocheez · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's doubtful I could convince anyone that a downer like Catherine Lacey's Nobody Is Ever Missing is worth reading, even if I compare it to a similar, better-received (i.e. higher GR average rating) novel like Jenny Offill's dour artsy pastiche of marital/maternal dissatisfaction, Dept. of Speculation. While most of my friends (and critics "in the know") praised the stream of consciousness random poetic stylings of Dept..., I could barely tolerate it, partly because of its icy remove, partly because I never really could get over the fact that the same Jenny Offill that wrote about Sparky! the sloth (that my daughter absolutely loved) could also create characters like Dept...'s "The Wife" who seemed a hair's-breadth away from committing some unspeakable post-partum act with her own child.

Ms. Lacey's Elyria, though, while similar to Ms. Offill's "Wife", is a much more sympathetic character. She also makes really strange decisions borne from grief and frustration, but I doubt there's few of us that have not, at some time in our lives, felt so disenchanted by circumstances that you just want to go somewhere far far away. Elyria, a soap opera writer (married to a Columbia U. math professor) in NYC, decides on a whim (after meeting a writer from New Zealand at a party) to fly there with little more than a rucksack and the clothes on her back.

Ms. Lacey, like Ms. Offill, employs stream of consciousness narration in depicting Elyria's plight. Unlike Ms. Offill's "The Wife", (who I couldn't give a tinker's damn for), I wanted to take Elyria home and give her a warm blanket and a bowl of chowder, because, you know, I've been in Elyria's wanderlust-y shoes, in an ill-fated search for a life that makes sense. (ok, maybe I've never been to NZ, but from an alternate angle and an eye squint, Alabama's a world away from Southern California.) You never can outrace depression. And you can't help but feel horrible for Elyria as she tries.

[Nelliamoci · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nessuno scompare davvero finché abbiamo in testa tutti quei momenti che ci legano alle persone più care (o più odiate). Un poco banale, forse, ma decisamente l’unica costante della nostra vita dove è difficile, però, accettare che i ricordi più belli siano, ovviamente, i primi a essere destinati all’oblio mentre quelli brutti, quelli che dovrebbero subito finire nel dimenticatoio, siano quelli che restano e continuano a roderci il fegato e frantumarci il cuore.

https://justanotherpoint.wordpress.co...

[Nate Erickson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Getting old sucks. Getting old sucks, like, a lot. Not only do we all get uglier, fatter, we also tend to start losing “ourselves”. Turning 25 this year, I was scared shitless. “Who am I?” “What am I doing?” “Where am I going?” were just a few of the questions I found myself contemplating, so upon reading the summary for Catherine Lacey’s debut novel Nobody is Ever Missing, I couldn’t help but make it my next read.

Elyria is a twenty-eight-year-old soap opera writer from Manhattan, married, no children; her life is the essence of stability. However, still coping with the death of her sister and tumultuous childhood, and growing tired of the monotony in her “stale” life, she decides to escape from it all. Without alerting anyone, Elyria leaves the country on a one-way journey to New Zealand to cleanse herself of herself and to embrace nothingness. Nobody is Ever Missing is the story of one person’s struggle with identity, in Elyria’s case, the purging of one. Written in deeply personal first-person prose, Nobody is Ever Missing is an essential story for the contemporary. It is an intimate look into the mind of a person suffering from the loss of a loved one, as well as dealing with a troublesome marriage.

Overall, the story is absolutely fantastic. Catherine Lacey has managed to not only create a character that is both loveable and loathsome, but she has managed to create a character that readers will recognize, a character not unlike themselves. While Elyria is female and the story is very much written in feminist prose, it isn’t difficult for either sex to identify with. The beauty of Nobody is Ever Missing is that a 25-year-old middle class white man can pick it up and feel exactly what Elyria is feeling. “Am I ready to be married?” “Is it possible to be completely alone?” “Why can’t my brain just turn off?” While I can’t help but attribute some of these feels to my current state of being, but most of the credit is given to Lacey.

To accompany Lacey’s storytelling is the style in which she writes. It’s difficult to describe. While reading, it seems as though you are reading the actual thoughts running through a person’s head, raw and disjointed. The best part is that the writing, for the most part, isn’t overly complex, it has a flow of actual consciousness. This a feat I marveled at throughout: Lacey made a fictitious character seem so real that I had to question whether or not it was a memoir. The only time the novel falters at all is at the end of a chapter. The end of most chapters serve as a sort of summary section to recap what had happened in the last few pages. However, it isn’t done through Elyria going into detail about the happenings, instead she describes what happens through analogies. At first, I really enjoyed them; they were mostly humorous and meaningful, but the more they were used, the more I disliked them. What I instead would have liked to have read would have been one or two analogies that become a crucial part of the story.

Rating: 8 out of 10 – Catherine Lacey succeeded in writing an exceptional debut novel. The story is raw and to the point, successfully capturing the human condition and in less than 300 pages. If you are looking for a novel to read in one or two sittings, this is it. However, if you are looking for any answers to you “aging crisis”, you better look elsewhere, atonement is not one of this books themes. Great read.

Written for astheplotthins.com

[Nooshin · Rating 2 out of 5]

داستان یک زن که یک روز تصمیم میگیره شهر و خانواده رو رها کنه و بره یه سمت دیگه کره زمین در یک جای گمشده زندگی کنه. مو‌ضوع جالب بود حتی بعضی قسمتهای کتاب جذاب بود ک صرفا داشت احساساتی رو بیان میکرد که هیچ توجیه علمی ندارند ولی در زندگی خانم‌ها اتفاق میفتن. ابتدای کتاب از انتهای کتاب برام جذابتر بود، آخرها بیشتر میخواستم زود تموم بشه. در کل در بین داستان‌های زنان خوب بود.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

wow wow wow wow so beautifully written

as someone who suffers with severe depression, being in the narrator's head was a lot like being in my own head in a way that was both comforting and scary. i will definitely come back and read certain parts of this book again and again.

[Maddy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't think books like this were written anymore.

[میعاد · Rating 2 out of 5]

تکراری، غیرمنطقی و بی‌هدف.
می‌تونست داستان کوتاهی ۱۰ صفحه‌ای باشه😺

[Jyoti · Rating 5 out of 5]

As soon as I finished this book I wanted to curl up in a ball and cry, though not in a despairing kind of way. More like a cathartic kind of way--an intense sobbing episode that seems to come from nowhere but is exactly what you need to release a slow build-up of pent up stress and emotion.

I had never heard of Catherine Lacey before (this is her first novel but she's had short works published) but I trust the FSG originals brand and the book was also on the staff recommended shelf at the Powell's Books on Hawthorne (Portland, OR). I needed a book for a long, international flight for a vacation that was to be full of reflection and this book was a perfect choice. It was at once at magnifying glass on the mind of a mentally ill narrator as well as a meditation of modern life from 32,000 feet.

Our narrator, Elyria Riley, has left her husband and seemingly perfect life in Manhattan to wander aimlessly around New Zealand. She seems to be on the outside of everything, watching people and everyday life from behind a bell jar. In fact, the prose reminded me strongly of Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf. Catherine Lacey has brilliantly captured the fractured mind of a woman who is unable to function in the world. A woman who feels too much to the point where she is unable to feel anything at all. While there is a distinct story arc to the book this is not what you would call a neat, linear narrative. Like an abstract painter, Lacey has created a work of art with words that have many layers and deliberate technique to its messiness.

This is a book to read the same way you would listen to sad music when you are upset. It takes every negative emotion you have felt and just magnifies it and builds it up but is somehow soothing in its beautiful negativity. It is not a message of "everything is shit" it is a message of "I want to feel, I want beauty, more than anything, but it is out of reach." The technique is brilliant. Lacey's sentences are thick and dense and lyrical and circular (more like spiralling) and seemingly never end, but once you are finished each one you feel like you have tumbled in to a new understanding. This is exactly my kind of novel. It is a book to fall in to, not think about, as the author has thought of everything for you. Read the way each word falls perfectly with next and paints a vivid picture of an unstable mind who in the end seems to be the only stable force in this world.

I'm editing this review to add a one-line review I read from someone else on Goodreads: "I didn't think books like this were written anymore."

Yes and YES. It has that modernist feel yet is contemporary without being a facsimile. I hope more books like this are being written again.

[Chris Blocker · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wasn't feeling the love through much of Nobody Is Ever Missing. I thought the premise of Catherine Lacey's debut novel sounded enthralling, but the story was anything but. Without telling her family, our protagonist, Elyria, journeys half way around the world and wanders New Zealand. The potential for character development and crafting a beautiful setting was certainly there, but much of the novel takes place in flashbacks of Elyria's past. I was disappointed, trudging slowly through the novel's landscape.

At some point, in the last half, the novel clicked for me. I still thought it was slow and certainly not what I wanted from it, but the beauty of the language and the grittiness of Elyria's journey settled in. I may have not been enraptured with Elyria's trek itself, but I was with her character: her strength and weakness, her drive and her lack of direction, her passion and her callousness—she became very real. The language used to take the reader through Elyria's various mental states is vivid, breathtaking, and original. At times, the metaphors overreach, but these moments are few, especially in the novel's concluding chapters where the ride becomes more fast paced and psychological.

Given my initial reaction, I'm quite surprised I enjoyed this one as much as I did. Certainly, it is not the captivating, plot-driven novel many readers are seeking, but in the end, Nobody Is Ever Missing is a well told story of one woman's crisis of mind. Through not quite as lyrical as some poetic prose, I'd say this one will resonate more with readers of poetry than with hardcore fans of story.

[Mack · Rating 3 out of 5]

I simply need a break from reading depression girlie novels

cw: suicide

There are some books that make me wanna die lowkey but in like a vague empty way, and I usually just push through and get to the end as soon as possible. I liked the premise of this book a lot and Catherine Lacey has always been someone I gravitate towards, she explores characters that indulge parts of me that are dangerous to indulge, but I realized in reading this book that I don’t really want to indulge those parts of myself any longer. This is projection but sometimes reading books like this I imagine the author wrote this story instead of doing something worse, so I’m usually glad these stories exist and their authors do as well. Idk, rough.

Also beyond the deep nihilism and downward spiral of this story and this character there was just some sloppy writing that I didn’t love and she even references how frequent and heavy handed her metaphors are which i agree with! I also didn’t Loooooove the kind of caricature trans bff who pops up in the middle of the novel and the attempt at flattening of experiences of feeling Other, it felt a little clunky to me but c’est la vie.

effective, triggering, genuinely stimulating at times, and cringey at others ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Niyousha · Rating 3 out of 5]

چرا آخرش پایان باز تموم شد؟
همش منتظر بودم برگرده پیش شوهرش، اصلا نفهمیدم چرا ترکش کرده بود. قصه بک گراندی هم که تعریف میکرد خیلی چرت و پرت و بی ربط بود.
خواهرش برای چی خودکشی کرده بود؟ پدر و مادرش چرا از همدیگه جدا شده بودند؟ پدرش اصلا کی بود ؟ مادرش چرا الکلی بود؟ برای چی اصلا خواهرشو به فرزندی قبول کرده بودند؟
کلی سوال حل نشده واقعا تو این داستان بود که نویسنده به خودش زحمت ندادن بود حل کنه.

[Amelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a huge book and one I've personally recommended to multiple people already in addition to the blurb. I mailed the galley to my friend and regret doing this because now I miss it. The summative blurb: "This book lives and breathes. It is a squall and Catherine Lacey is a force."