Secret Agent Man

by Margot Singer

A striking collection of personal and poetic essays about memory and loss, obscurity and clarity, the search for identity and the meaning of home.

Award-winning short story author and novelist Margot Singer’s essay collection is a powerful exploration of family history, memory, and the meaning of home. The daughter and granddaughter of European Jews displaced by the Holocaust, Singer probes the nature of time and history, obscurity and clarity, displacement and loss. The title essay probes her memories of her father—was he or was he not a spy?—as it grapples with the riddle of whether our parents ever are who we imagine them to be. The impact of these essays is cumulative; page by page, they build into a moving examination of the mysteries and betrayals of the body, desire, artistic ambition, identity, and place.

Secret Agent Man traces Singer’s journey from her childhood in Boston, growing up with a father “who wasn’t like anybody else’s dad,” to her days as a high-powered management consultant in New York City, to her mid-life relocation to a small college town in the heart of the Midwest. Compelling, questioning, and yearning, this collection combines a poet’s engagement with language with the essayist’s intimate, reflective voice.

Genres: Memoir

170 pages, Paperback

Published June 15, 2025

About the author

Margot Singer is a graduate of the University of Utah (Ph.D. 2005), Oxford University (M.Phil.1986) and Harvard University (B.A. 1984). From 1986 until 1997 she worked for the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, where she was a Principal in the New York Office. She currently teaches at Denison University, where she holds the Bosler Endowed Faculty Fellowship, and in the low-residency MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She lives with her husband and two children in Granville, Ohio

Reviews

[Audrey Ashbrook · Rating 5 out of 5]

Secret Agent Man by Margot Singer is a collection of essays that delves into family, heritage, history, the passage of time, sexual assault, clothing, jobs, moving and displacement, loss, the meaning of home, and love. 

I was completely captivated by this collection of essays! I loved what Singer wrote about her father in “Secret Agent Man” and “Counterclockwise.” “The Power Suit” and “Call It Rape” were both incredibly powerful. “God's Eye” was insightful. I loved “A Natural History of Small-Town Ohio.” 

Incredible and I would love to read more!

[Erika Dreifus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous, smart, evocative writing.

NB: My "shelves" aren't *entirely* accurate in this case. This book is an essay collection instead of a single-narrative memoir. And with a couple of exceptions, the essays don't focus explicitly on Jewishness.