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Something Missing
Diane, an uneducated young Australian mother meets by chance, Maggie, a sophisticated American poet. Their pen-friendship changes both their lives. Everything, from age, class and nationality seems to separate them but both are struggling to cope with personal issues. Maggie is trapped in a marriage involving infidelity and rape, as well as grieving for her eldest daughter Anna. Diane unconsciously yearns for the same opportunity of an education given to her brother but denied to her. This is a story of two unfulfilled women finding each other when they need it most.
260 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 6, 2017
I was lucky enough to win this book in a Giveaway here on Goodreads and I must admit that I really enjoyed this book a lot. What drew my most to enter the giveaway??"Their pen-friendship will change them forever."
I absolutely love writing letters to my penfriends and I have made so many wonderful friends through the years. Sadly I know that I will not be at privileged as Diane and Maggie to ever meet any of them. the finances doesn't allow for it...but meeting them in our letters is amazing and I feel privileged to be able that they share a bit of their life with me.
In the 1970s two women meet, by chance, in the Australian outback during a holiday. Diane is a young mother, a hairdresser by trade, whose encounter with the older, American Maggie, an assistant to her academic husband, Hank, begins a friendship firstly explored through letters and, as the years pass, through Diane’s visits to Maggie. From the start Maggie is the ‘older and wiser’ of the two; she encourages Diane to buy a dictionary and work hard at her grammar and spelling and she is the one who recommends books for Diane to read. Maggie is not being truthful about the state of her marriage, nor her relationship with one of her daughters, although the true extent of her deception is not revealed until much later in the novel. The friendship appears to have a greater impact on Diane. It is she who begins to enter another type of world: returning to study and falling in love with literature, making a move away from the working arena of hairdressing and stepping, eventually, towards authorship.
Maggie later on starts revealing something about her past to Diane. Maggie lets go of the need to have a ‘truthful’ account of her life retold and concedes to Diane: ‘Do what you like. Maybe add some fiction. I’m not an interesting person’ (190). A moment later she hides the reality of her life from Diane: ‘Maggie rubs the palm of her hand with her thumb. He abused me you know. Abused me in the bedroom’ (191).
The issue of growing old and the decision to die with dignity is the most successful idea of the work where strong portraits of Hank and Maggie’s struggles with the limitations of age contrast with Diane’s new incarnation as a writer. The different trajectories of the characters in the latter half of the book serve to evoke sympathy for Maggie, as we come to know her struggles intimately and feel the sadness of her decline.
I absolutely love writing letters to my penfriends and I have made so many wonderful friends through the years. Sadly I know that I will not be at privileged as Diane and Maggie to ever meet any of them. the finances doesn't allow for it...but meeting them in our letters is amazing and I feel privileged to be able that they share a bit of their life with me.
In the 1970s two women meet, by chance, in the Australian outback during a holiday. Diane is a young mother, a hairdresser by trade, whose encounter with the older, American Maggie, an assistant to her academic husband, Hank, begins a friendship firstly explored through letters and, as the years pass, through Diane’s visits to Maggie. From the start Maggie is the ‘older and wiser’ of the two; she encourages Diane to buy a dictionary and work hard at her grammar and spelling and she is the one who recommends books for Diane to read. Maggie is not being truthful about the state of her marriage, nor her relationship with one of her daughters, although the true extent of her deception is not revealed until much later in the novel. The friendship appears to have a greater impact on Diane. It is she who begins to enter another type of world: returning to study and falling in love with literature, making a move away from the working arena of hairdressing and stepping, eventually, towards authorship.
Maggie later on starts revealing something about her past to Diane. Maggie lets go of the need to have a ‘truthful’ account of her life retold and concedes to Diane: ‘Do what you like. Maybe add some fiction. I’m not an interesting person’ (190). A moment later she hides the reality of her life from Diane: ‘Maggie rubs the palm of her hand with her thumb. He abused me you know. Abused me in the bedroom’ (191).
The issue of growing old and the decision to die with dignity is the most successful idea of the work where strong portraits of Hank and Maggie’s struggles with the limitations of age contrast with Diane’s new incarnation as a writer. The different trajectories of the characters in the latter half of the book serve to evoke sympathy for Maggie, as we come to know her struggles intimately and feel the sadness of her decline.
February 7, 2017
Two people, two generations, one Australian suburban, the other American academic, connect by chance. Over the decades and across the seas the connection matures as their lives change. Their friendship brings strength and inspiration to both, is tested, and endures.
Characterisation is deft, evolving over time, and in ways that the characters do not perhaps anticipate.
This novel is composed like a painting, or perhaps like a sequence of paintings, the characters depicted and deployed so as to balance the whole. Each scene is almost the story in itself, we know what it is about, action and dialogue serve to illuminate, rather than delineate.
This a novel to be read without expectations, to attempt to describe it in a phrase would inevitably do it a disservice, so just read it.
Characterisation is deft, evolving over time, and in ways that the characters do not perhaps anticipate.
This novel is composed like a painting, or perhaps like a sequence of paintings, the characters depicted and deployed so as to balance the whole. Each scene is almost the story in itself, we know what it is about, action and dialogue serve to illuminate, rather than delineate.
This a novel to be read without expectations, to attempt to describe it in a phrase would inevitably do it a disservice, so just read it.
November 19, 2016
The poet Muriel Rukeyser once said: ‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open’. Something Missing is a work that confronts you with truths about the lives of women, and how the truth can indeed split open the world of one’s own life. Beautifully and powerfully told, in Something Missing, the reader embarks on a journey.
Born in a time when women were expected to leave school early to marry, Diane is a young, Australian wife, mother and hairdresser when she meets Maggie in the Australian desert. It is a meeting that will change both their lives.
American, world traveled, well read and sharply intelligent, Maggie has lived a life poles apart from Diane’s. The older and knowledgeable Maggie re-awakes in Diane her pushed down desire for education, education denied to her in her youth. For Maggie, her reasons for letting Diane into her life, and eventually her heart, are far more complicated.
Both women have dark secrets hidden away in their histories, and lives dictated and constrained by their female gender. The long years of deepening friendship reveals to Diane that Maggie’s life is not what it seems on the surface, that there is something missing from both their lives, something that can only be put right by their enduring friendship. It is a friendship that is first unequal, but evolves over time to when Diane steps out of Maggie's shadow, seizes her own identity and self determined destiny. Empathetic, full of life’s truths and wise – Something Missing is a novel that stays with you and speaks to our hearts.
Born in a time when women were expected to leave school early to marry, Diane is a young, Australian wife, mother and hairdresser when she meets Maggie in the Australian desert. It is a meeting that will change both their lives.
American, world traveled, well read and sharply intelligent, Maggie has lived a life poles apart from Diane’s. The older and knowledgeable Maggie re-awakes in Diane her pushed down desire for education, education denied to her in her youth. For Maggie, her reasons for letting Diane into her life, and eventually her heart, are far more complicated.
Both women have dark secrets hidden away in their histories, and lives dictated and constrained by their female gender. The long years of deepening friendship reveals to Diane that Maggie’s life is not what it seems on the surface, that there is something missing from both their lives, something that can only be put right by their enduring friendship. It is a friendship that is first unequal, but evolves over time to when Diane steps out of Maggie's shadow, seizes her own identity and self determined destiny. Empathetic, full of life’s truths and wise – Something Missing is a novel that stays with you and speaks to our hearts.
April 15, 2017
Inspirational, moving and at times heartbreaking, I was sold on the complexity of these two women from the first page and was satisfied with every page after.
I would definitely read it again if my family stopped stealing the books I talk about......
I would definitely read it again if my family stopped stealing the books I talk about......
March 30, 2017
Glenice Whitting is the master of character studies. I’ve read both of her novels now (the latest being Something Missing, the first being Pickle to Pie) and if there’s one thing she surpasses almost all other writers in, it’s unravelling the intricacies of people living ordinary lives.
In Something Missing, the two main characters living ordinary lives are Diane and Maggie. Diane is Australian, a hairdresser, has a daughter from her first marriage, is onto her second marriage and is travelling in outback Australia with her family. Maggie is American, an unacknowledged research assistant to her academic husband, mother to two grown daughters and thirty years older than Diane. When they cross paths on their travels in the 1970s and exchange addresses, it’s the start of a decades-long pen pal friendship.
It gets off to a rocky start. Diane is enthusiastic but uneducated and when Maggie returns her first letter full of red pen corrections, she’s a little miffed. But she’s big enough to move past it and is eventually inspired to better herself by enrolling to study at university. We follow Diane through a mostly forward progression as she gains her bachelor’s degree, writes short stories, wins a competition for an unpublished manuscript before finally graduating with a PhD in writing and publishing her first book in her sixties.
At the same time, we go back into Maggie’s past to see how she became who she is, going from a family who value education above almost everything to a student who drops out of college in order to marry, indulging in drinking too much and suffering from occasional domestic abuse (physical and emotional) until her husband’s death finally allows her to focus on herself. But is it too late for both of them?
The book is more than just a tad semi-autobiographical and I know this because I know Glenice. We studied together back in the late 1990s when she was beginning the writing journey that Diane mirrors almost identically. And Glenice has acknowledged in interviews that she herself had and was inspired by her thirty-five year plus pen pal relationship with an American poet in real life. It makes it a little difficult to critique the lack of plot when it is someone’s life. So perhaps I’ll just leave it this: there isn’t much of a plot but then again it’s not that kind of book.
The writing, though, is beautiful and the descriptions scattered throughout are perfect (for lack of a better word). When she describes the lacy patterns the incoming tide makes on the beach at Australia’s Phillip Island, it made me think, “That’s so spot on.” Having been there and seen it and knowing what she was talking about, it was a perfect description. And as someone who generally starts to skip chunks of descriptive text in books where I feel there’s too much, I was never tempted to do that in Something Missing.
I read an interview that said Glenice reworked the original manuscript from literary fiction to more resemble popular fiction in order to get it published but I feel it would have worked even better as literary fiction. Perhaps her publisher didn’t really do her any favours. Because the book is also in desperate need of a thorough edit – it’s full of bad grammar, poor punctuation, misspellings, a huge number of typos and italics that run on for paragraphs longer than they should have. Some of the letters are out of chronological order when all the previous ones have been arranged by date and at one point a character mentions having a computer with Windows 7 nine years before it was released by Microsoft. It’s all quite distracting, especially since the Maggie character is constantly lecturing Diane on the importance of proper English. Since her lectures suffer from the problems she is lecturing about, it really undermines her.
Still there’s much to like about this book and it’s the sort of thing that both English Literature classes and book clubs can have an absolute field day with.
In Something Missing, the two main characters living ordinary lives are Diane and Maggie. Diane is Australian, a hairdresser, has a daughter from her first marriage, is onto her second marriage and is travelling in outback Australia with her family. Maggie is American, an unacknowledged research assistant to her academic husband, mother to two grown daughters and thirty years older than Diane. When they cross paths on their travels in the 1970s and exchange addresses, it’s the start of a decades-long pen pal friendship.
It gets off to a rocky start. Diane is enthusiastic but uneducated and when Maggie returns her first letter full of red pen corrections, she’s a little miffed. But she’s big enough to move past it and is eventually inspired to better herself by enrolling to study at university. We follow Diane through a mostly forward progression as she gains her bachelor’s degree, writes short stories, wins a competition for an unpublished manuscript before finally graduating with a PhD in writing and publishing her first book in her sixties.
At the same time, we go back into Maggie’s past to see how she became who she is, going from a family who value education above almost everything to a student who drops out of college in order to marry, indulging in drinking too much and suffering from occasional domestic abuse (physical and emotional) until her husband’s death finally allows her to focus on herself. But is it too late for both of them?
The book is more than just a tad semi-autobiographical and I know this because I know Glenice. We studied together back in the late 1990s when she was beginning the writing journey that Diane mirrors almost identically. And Glenice has acknowledged in interviews that she herself had and was inspired by her thirty-five year plus pen pal relationship with an American poet in real life. It makes it a little difficult to critique the lack of plot when it is someone’s life. So perhaps I’ll just leave it this: there isn’t much of a plot but then again it’s not that kind of book.
The writing, though, is beautiful and the descriptions scattered throughout are perfect (for lack of a better word). When she describes the lacy patterns the incoming tide makes on the beach at Australia’s Phillip Island, it made me think, “That’s so spot on.” Having been there and seen it and knowing what she was talking about, it was a perfect description. And as someone who generally starts to skip chunks of descriptive text in books where I feel there’s too much, I was never tempted to do that in Something Missing.
I read an interview that said Glenice reworked the original manuscript from literary fiction to more resemble popular fiction in order to get it published but I feel it would have worked even better as literary fiction. Perhaps her publisher didn’t really do her any favours. Because the book is also in desperate need of a thorough edit – it’s full of bad grammar, poor punctuation, misspellings, a huge number of typos and italics that run on for paragraphs longer than they should have. Some of the letters are out of chronological order when all the previous ones have been arranged by date and at one point a character mentions having a computer with Windows 7 nine years before it was released by Microsoft. It’s all quite distracting, especially since the Maggie character is constantly lecturing Diane on the importance of proper English. Since her lectures suffer from the problems she is lecturing about, it really undermines her.
Still there’s much to like about this book and it’s the sort of thing that both English Literature classes and book clubs can have an absolute field day with.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews