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Missing Persons: A Memoir
Missing Persons is a memoir about dealing with death in a culture that gives no help. As the last of her family, Greene’s losses are stark, first her aunt, then her mother, in quick succession. She is as ill-equipped for the challenges of caring for a dying person at home as she is for the other losses, long repressed, that rise to confront her at this the suicide of her younger brother, the death of her father. As the professional identity on which she’s based her selfhood comes to feel brittle and trivial, she is catapulted into questions of “who am I?” and “what have I done with my life?”
The memoir is structured as an account of her mother's and aunt’s final days and the year that follows, a year in which she reconstructs her life. This is a powerful story about family, what it means to have one, to lose one, never to have made one, and what, if anything, might take its place. It’s the story of a vexed mother-daughter relationship that mellows with age. It is also a search for home, as the very landscape shifts around her and the vast orchards are dug up and paved over for tract housing, strip malls, freeways, and the Santa Clara Valley, once known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight, is transformed to “Silicon.”
The memoir is structured as an account of her mother's and aunt’s final days and the year that follows, a year in which she reconstructs her life. This is a powerful story about family, what it means to have one, to lose one, never to have made one, and what, if anything, might take its place. It’s the story of a vexed mother-daughter relationship that mellows with age. It is also a search for home, as the very landscape shifts around her and the vast orchards are dug up and paved over for tract housing, strip malls, freeways, and the Santa Clara Valley, once known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight, is transformed to “Silicon.”
- GenresMemoirNonfiction
255 pages, Paperback
Published October 18, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
December 5, 2017
Missing Persons, by Gayle Greene
Reviewed by Catherine Pyke
Missing Persons, by Gayle Greene is not an easy read.
I had to read this book in small doses, because I found myself (not an overly emotional person usually,) choking back tears. If you have an aging parent or have recently lost a beloved family member or friend, brace yourself for what can at times feel like a relentless, agonizing account of the indignities of a loved one’s final illness and the inconsolable loss it causes the survivor. After unexpectedly losing her aunt and mother in the same year, Greene realized that she was “the end of the line.”
A professor emerita at Scripps College who has written widely on Shakespeare, contemporary women’s fiction and feminist theory, Greene brings the full power of her reflective skills to the quandary in which she suddenly finds herself -- feeling alone in the world, with a newly shaken sense of her own identity and purpose. “The story of your life makes sense when your mother’s there to know it,” she writes. But she loses her grounding, when she begins to believe that her own life has gone missing along with those of the ones she loved. What follows is an intense immersion into her long process of grief, mourning and self-identity that has been complicated by earlier losses of her only brother and father and her own choice not to have children.
Reading this book, one quickly understands that her world had revolved around her 89 year old mother, Agnes, an intelligent beauty who had played and taught piano and a slightly younger aunt, Lydia, who she called Paddy, a medical secretary and singer who had been rescued from spinsterhood in her late 50s when she married a widower. After Greene’s physician father left her then 45 year old mother for a series of younger women, Greene and her five year younger brother, Bill, lived with their mother on Clinton Road in Los Altos, a town in the Santa Clara Valley, before it became known as Silicon Valley. Greene’s book at times hints of the theme’s of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, of a time before the orchards of Santa Clara Valley made way for tract housing and freeways and was still known as “Valley of Heart’s Delight.”
We see that the beauty of this place resides as deeply in her soul as do the memories of her loved ones as she finds herself torn over whether she should leave after her mother’s death or stay. We also sense a peripatetic quality about her life that persists for years, a restlessness of continually being torn between pursuing her own life as a professor in Southern California from Tuesday through Thursday, while knowing she was needed and missed on those days in Northern California. As a result, she could never feel fully rooted in either place.
For much of the book, Greene pours over family photos, organizing them into albums for each lost family member and searching for answers to emotionally wrenching questions – her mother’s depression and lost opportunities, why her father left, and most devastating of all – what caused her brother to take his own life.
Greene is too great a feminist to end her story with a romance and she often reminds us of the lessons she’s picked up from her mother – never trust any man. But we cheer for her when she begins to see that she deserves her own life and happiness and recognizes in her partner, Bob, someone who loves and values her enough to build a life together. This is where the reward of this intense book comes, and it is one well worth the agonizing journey.
Reviewed by Catherine Pyke
Missing Persons, by Gayle Greene is not an easy read.
I had to read this book in small doses, because I found myself (not an overly emotional person usually,) choking back tears. If you have an aging parent or have recently lost a beloved family member or friend, brace yourself for what can at times feel like a relentless, agonizing account of the indignities of a loved one’s final illness and the inconsolable loss it causes the survivor. After unexpectedly losing her aunt and mother in the same year, Greene realized that she was “the end of the line.”
A professor emerita at Scripps College who has written widely on Shakespeare, contemporary women’s fiction and feminist theory, Greene brings the full power of her reflective skills to the quandary in which she suddenly finds herself -- feeling alone in the world, with a newly shaken sense of her own identity and purpose. “The story of your life makes sense when your mother’s there to know it,” she writes. But she loses her grounding, when she begins to believe that her own life has gone missing along with those of the ones she loved. What follows is an intense immersion into her long process of grief, mourning and self-identity that has been complicated by earlier losses of her only brother and father and her own choice not to have children.
Reading this book, one quickly understands that her world had revolved around her 89 year old mother, Agnes, an intelligent beauty who had played and taught piano and a slightly younger aunt, Lydia, who she called Paddy, a medical secretary and singer who had been rescued from spinsterhood in her late 50s when she married a widower. After Greene’s physician father left her then 45 year old mother for a series of younger women, Greene and her five year younger brother, Bill, lived with their mother on Clinton Road in Los Altos, a town in the Santa Clara Valley, before it became known as Silicon Valley. Greene’s book at times hints of the theme’s of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, of a time before the orchards of Santa Clara Valley made way for tract housing and freeways and was still known as “Valley of Heart’s Delight.”
We see that the beauty of this place resides as deeply in her soul as do the memories of her loved ones as she finds herself torn over whether she should leave after her mother’s death or stay. We also sense a peripatetic quality about her life that persists for years, a restlessness of continually being torn between pursuing her own life as a professor in Southern California from Tuesday through Thursday, while knowing she was needed and missed on those days in Northern California. As a result, she could never feel fully rooted in either place.
For much of the book, Greene pours over family photos, organizing them into albums for each lost family member and searching for answers to emotionally wrenching questions – her mother’s depression and lost opportunities, why her father left, and most devastating of all – what caused her brother to take his own life.
Greene is too great a feminist to end her story with a romance and she often reminds us of the lessons she’s picked up from her mother – never trust any man. But we cheer for her when she begins to see that she deserves her own life and happiness and recognizes in her partner, Bob, someone who loves and values her enough to build a life together. This is where the reward of this intense book comes, and it is one well worth the agonizing journey.
November 13, 2017
"It will have to do for now, it will have to do, this mourning book, this long good-bye."
This line from Gayle Greene's memoir, Missing Persons, neatly sums up this fascinating foray into loss, grief, and self-identity. Greene takes the reader on a journey of mourning that is complicated by previous losses and the author's choice not to have any children, which results in the family lineage ending with her. As one of ten siblings and the mother of eight children, I can't begin to imagine what that must feel like. I don't need to imagine mother loss, however; my mother died in 2010.
One thing we have in common; we were both responsible for going through our respective mother's things for answers as to who they were. After my siblings chose what they wanted, I spent much of the winter after my mother's death, going through her things and utilizing her house as a private writing retreat. That slow-paced time was very healing for me. Greene's ritual of spending hours organizing family photos seemed to do the same for her, serving as a way of honoring the family legacy, while finding some comfort for herself. But it is clear that writing the book was truly a way of saying goodbye, not only to her mother, but to the younger brother who'd committed suicide years before, and to her father, who walked out on the family.
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. Missing Persons takes the reader through the first year of mourning, demonstrating how difficult it is to go through a loved one's possessions, and making life-changing decisions about what is left behind, both literally (as in the house she must sell), and figuratively, as the author comes to terms with a less-than satisfying mother-daughter relationship. The family photos really add to the story, and where they are missing, the descriptive language she uses for hairstyles, clothing, and scenery more than makes up for their absence, creating pictures of her fascinating mother, aunt, father, and brother in the reader's mind.
On the first anniversary of her mother's death, Greene writes:
Readers will be grateful to Greene for sharing pieces of her enigma of a mother in this perceptive memoir. That she ends up sharing a great deal about her mother's sister, the beloved aunt, is no surprise. While in the beginning of the book the author clearly shares her reluctance to "go there" in regards to her brother's suicide, she does, indeed, end up there, mourning a brother, saying goodbye.
"Memoir as repair work, as reparations," she writes. It is clear by book's end, that the writing of it has done some repair work on her own aching heart, while touching the reader's, as well.
by Mary Potter Kenyon
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women
This line from Gayle Greene's memoir, Missing Persons, neatly sums up this fascinating foray into loss, grief, and self-identity. Greene takes the reader on a journey of mourning that is complicated by previous losses and the author's choice not to have any children, which results in the family lineage ending with her. As one of ten siblings and the mother of eight children, I can't begin to imagine what that must feel like. I don't need to imagine mother loss, however; my mother died in 2010.
One thing we have in common; we were both responsible for going through our respective mother's things for answers as to who they were. After my siblings chose what they wanted, I spent much of the winter after my mother's death, going through her things and utilizing her house as a private writing retreat. That slow-paced time was very healing for me. Greene's ritual of spending hours organizing family photos seemed to do the same for her, serving as a way of honoring the family legacy, while finding some comfort for herself. But it is clear that writing the book was truly a way of saying goodbye, not only to her mother, but to the younger brother who'd committed suicide years before, and to her father, who walked out on the family.
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. Missing Persons takes the reader through the first year of mourning, demonstrating how difficult it is to go through a loved one's possessions, and making life-changing decisions about what is left behind, both literally (as in the house she must sell), and figuratively, as the author comes to terms with a less-than satisfying mother-daughter relationship. The family photos really add to the story, and where they are missing, the descriptive language she uses for hairstyles, clothing, and scenery more than makes up for their absence, creating pictures of her fascinating mother, aunt, father, and brother in the reader's mind.
On the first anniversary of her mother's death, Greene writes:
I spend the evening writing, it's better than weeping. I guess lots of people do this, write about a person they've lost because they can't bear to think that person is really gone, that she, in her amazing, absolute uniqueness is absolutely gone. Come back, stay a little. I find the right word and it feels like I've salvaged a piece of them—I can leave it a little, let the pain go into the words, know that it's still there, it will always be there, but I don't have to carry it around all the time.
Readers will be grateful to Greene for sharing pieces of her enigma of a mother in this perceptive memoir. That she ends up sharing a great deal about her mother's sister, the beloved aunt, is no surprise. While in the beginning of the book the author clearly shares her reluctance to "go there" in regards to her brother's suicide, she does, indeed, end up there, mourning a brother, saying goodbye.
"Memoir as repair work, as reparations," she writes. It is clear by book's end, that the writing of it has done some repair work on her own aching heart, while touching the reader's, as well.
by Mary Potter Kenyon
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women
December 22, 2017
.A brilliant, powerful, memoir about how the loss of so many people affected her life. A gift to all of us.
By Ruth Rosen on Nov 08, 2017
There are some memoirs that stay with you forever, like Vivian Gornick's Fierce Attachments and this is one of them. Gayle Greene has written a brilliant, deeply researched exploration of the impact of the deaths of her brother, aunt and mother, leaving her with too many missing persons. Through those deaths she sifts through her grief to find joys and sorrows of a life lived well, but not conventionally. As she comes to grips with these enormous losses, she finds herself with a voice that is powerful, memorable, strong, feminist and wise. While reading this, I woke up every night, deeply moved every time by some passage, words or event.. This is a brave book, a courageous excavation of her past. Although she was a professor and known for her many contributions in feminist theory, the life of Alice Stewart, and the problem of insomnia there is not a whiff of academic life in this powerful memoir. It is wise and I'm grateful for her insights. .
The context for these losses is the beautiful valley that has now been taken over by immense tech companies. Even though I've lived in Northern California since 1967, I never grasped, until now, the world in which she grew up. With almost cinematic imagery she takes the reader from that lost valley, through teaching in southern California, living and thriving in Berkeley, and finding calm and beauty in the unforgettable beauty of Mendocino. Had she set her memoir in New York, I believe it would have been published by a famous publisher. The fact that her life mostly shuttles up and down the California coast has given her a wonderful publisher in Nevada. This is too often the fate of memoirs that take place in the "regions" outside New York. I could not stop reading her book; Gayle was in my mind and heart as I compulsively entered her life and traveled with her through the pain and bliss she has experienced.
If you liked Fierce Attachments, you will love this memoir. I recommend it to everyone who has experienced losses, which includes most of us, and who wants to know how a brilliant woman navigated life with so many missing persons. .
.
By Ruth Rosen on Nov 08, 2017
There are some memoirs that stay with you forever, like Vivian Gornick's Fierce Attachments and this is one of them. Gayle Greene has written a brilliant, deeply researched exploration of the impact of the deaths of her brother, aunt and mother, leaving her with too many missing persons. Through those deaths she sifts through her grief to find joys and sorrows of a life lived well, but not conventionally. As she comes to grips with these enormous losses, she finds herself with a voice that is powerful, memorable, strong, feminist and wise. While reading this, I woke up every night, deeply moved every time by some passage, words or event.. This is a brave book, a courageous excavation of her past. Although she was a professor and known for her many contributions in feminist theory, the life of Alice Stewart, and the problem of insomnia there is not a whiff of academic life in this powerful memoir. It is wise and I'm grateful for her insights. .
The context for these losses is the beautiful valley that has now been taken over by immense tech companies. Even though I've lived in Northern California since 1967, I never grasped, until now, the world in which she grew up. With almost cinematic imagery she takes the reader from that lost valley, through teaching in southern California, living and thriving in Berkeley, and finding calm and beauty in the unforgettable beauty of Mendocino. Had she set her memoir in New York, I believe it would have been published by a famous publisher. The fact that her life mostly shuttles up and down the California coast has given her a wonderful publisher in Nevada. This is too often the fate of memoirs that take place in the "regions" outside New York. I could not stop reading her book; Gayle was in my mind and heart as I compulsively entered her life and traveled with her through the pain and bliss she has experienced.
If you liked Fierce Attachments, you will love this memoir. I recommend it to everyone who has experienced losses, which includes most of us, and who wants to know how a brilliant woman navigated life with so many missing persons. .
.
March 18, 2018
Missing Persons: A Memoir comes from one who becomes the last in her family after she loses her aunt and then her mother, facing the rigors of caring for a dying person at home and the ongoing feelings of loss that comes from their recent deaths and the prior demise of her younger brother and her father.
Gayle Greene was forced to confront basic questions of her values and journey in life as she lived through her mother and aunt's final days and a year's aftermath of being without them and without family ties.
The result is a hard-hitting account of one woman's adjustments and survival tactics that takes into account the broader issues of death, dying, and family heritage. Missing Persons is recommended for anyone who enjoys memoirs about family connections, loss, and disconnections.
Gayle Greene was forced to confront basic questions of her values and journey in life as she lived through her mother and aunt's final days and a year's aftermath of being without them and without family ties.
The result is a hard-hitting account of one woman's adjustments and survival tactics that takes into account the broader issues of death, dying, and family heritage. Missing Persons is recommended for anyone who enjoys memoirs about family connections, loss, and disconnections.
January 30, 2018
I received this book as part of the Goodreads Giveaway program. Missing Persons is a tribute memoir written in honor of Gayle Greene's mother and aunt who both passed away within a short amount of time from each other leaving Gayle without immediate family. This memoir is one that anyone who has ever lost their mother or an important female mother figure in their life can relate to. Greene pulls the reader in to her raw grief as she deals with her both her mother's and aunt's passing along with the drive to discover her mother's past and how it shaped her childhood and adulthood. A great memoir and a true tribute!
December 2, 2017
Enjoyed isn't really the right word. It made me think on so many levels, especially rethinking my own mother's death and the continuing realization of lost time and relationship. Her descriptions of Los Altos and what it was like in the l950s and onward are true to my own experiences during those days. Gayle and I were friends in high school and much of her experiences were mine. (especially the Beatnick times in North Beach coffee houses) Thank you Gayle for the memories good and bad of growing up in apricot paradise. And for bringing up again the pain and guilt of being a daughter
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May 8, 2021
In quick succession, the author suffers the loss of her beloved aunt and mother, and since she’d lost her brother and her father previously, discovers she’s alone, the last of her family. Sifting through photographs and belongings left behind, the author grieves her losses, including the end of a way of life in the California of her mother’s lifetime, and hers. With exquisite command of language, the author captures how we die and how we live and how we let go of our homes. “We had so much, Mother, how could we not know?” No magical thinking here.
December 7, 2017
A beautiful book, a loving meditation on grief, family, mother loss, and place.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews