Missing Men: A Memoir Book

Joyce Johnson has led the kind of life the rest of us only see in novels; who else gets to share a childhood stage with Marlon Brando dressed up as a bear? In her first two works of nonfiction, Door Wide Open and the award-winning Minor Characters, Johnson chronicled a beat coming of age through the lens of her brief relationship with Jack Kerouac. Missing Men fills in the gaps in this bohemian life story even as it highlights them. Fittingly enough for a woman who married two abstract painters, it's a book about negative space. Three extended reminiscences--one for her childhood, one for each of her marriages--tease out the patterns in a life that "shaped itself around absences." Missing men defined those she loved: her iron-willed mother, whose immigrant father killed himself when she was five; her two husbands, each fatherless, each with his own burden of tragedy and rage; Johnson herself, left behind with her freedom and her art. The writing, as always, is lovely and precise. Whether she is recounting the home-sewn dresses of her mother's lonely girlhood or the "metallic sputter" of the old red motorbike that ends her first marriage, Johnson breaks your heart with the tellingly chosen detail. --Mary ParkRead More