Missing Men
A Memoir
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- US$14.99
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- US$14.99
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From the author of Minor Characters, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award – an “intricate and compelling” (O, The Oprah Magazine) memoir that chronicles her childhood and her two ill-fated marriages
Joyce Johnson’s classic memoir of growing up female in the 1950s, Minor Characters, was one of the initiators of an important new genre: the personal story of a minor player on history’s stage. In Missing Men, a memoir that tells her mother’s story as well as her own, Johnson constructs an equally unique self-portrait as she examines, from a woman’s perspective, the far-reaching reverberations of fatherlessness. Telling a story that has "shaped itself around absences," Missing Men presents us with the arc and flavor of a unique New York life—from the author’s adventures as a Broadway stage child to her fateful encounters with the two fatherless artists she marries. Joyce Johnson’s voice has never been more compelling.
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Best known for her chronicles of the beats, Minor Characters and Door Wide Open (with Jack Kerouac), Johnson returns to those times as she retells the story of her life with and without the men who mattered most to her, including the grandfather for whom she was named, who committed suicide before she was born. "y life has shaped itself around absences," she writes, "first by happenstance; ultimately, perhaps, by choice." These absences form the structure of this fine memoir. The first section covers Johnson's early years as a child actress and her mother's intense desire for her to make something of herself. It ends with her mother, who goes on to become her "negative muse," poisoning her relationship with her father when she is 12. The second section focuses on Johnson's brief but intense relationship with her first husband, the painter James Johnson, whose early death left her a widow at 27. He left his mark in many ways from an appreciation that "the difference between life and death... could hang on a few inches" to her last name. Finally, Johnson dissects her short-lived second marriage to artist Peter Pinchbeck and her growing awakening to her own self-worth. Shortly before she leaves him, Johnson thinks, "How was it that I could be important enough to have my name in Newsweek, while at home I was little more than a housemaid?" Her deceptively simple prose cuts through the past, where "memories settled on stuff like dust." Photos. (On sale Apr. 26)
