A 144-word essay to mark the 10th anniversary re-issue of my first novel!
It’s probably best to become accustomed to being misunderstood, yet I was disturbed by how often people got the title of my first novel wrong, even sometimes while holding a copy of it.
The title of that book was Nobody Is Ever Missing, a line I permanently leased from John Berryman.
Sometimes people called it:
No One Is Ever Missing
or
No One Is Missing
or
Nobody Is Missing
or
Nothing Is Missing
and once, after a long and excited preamble about how much her book club liked it, a very nice woman told me she really loved reading Someone Is Always Missing.
I titled my second book simply, The Answers, and that solved it for a while until I was introduced to a crowd as the best-selling author of ‘The Answer.’
Oh my precious little details. How I encourage them to haunt me.
The above essay is 144 words, a part of a series explained over here.
Heavens — that means that it's been ten years since I read it. I really appreciated it, including being introduced to the Berryman poem. I promise that the precise phrase stayed intact in memory over all these years.
Another that really stuck — it's funny, I never thought to have the opportunity to pass the appreciation of it along — was a specific metaphor, a moment in the novel when one character experiences another as taking her words (or maybe it was her unexpressed words) and ”folding them up and stacking them neatly, like laundry.” (Or something close it that). There was something so precise and evocative about that that I think I wrote a word of praise in the margins. Many congratulations on the anniversary of the novel.
Apropos of the protagonist of Nobody Is Ever Missing. Recently finished the book and as a newly retired faculty member it resonated with my newly undefined unstructured existence.