Missing: A Memoir

A twenty-five-year-old recent graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program, Lindsay Harrison began writing Missing as a way to cope with a terrible loss. During her sophomore year at Brown University, Lindsay received a phone call from her brother that her mother was missing. Forty days later they discover the unthinkable: Their mother’s body had been found in the ocean. Missing is at first a page-turning account of those first forty days, as it chronicles dealings with detectives, false sightings, wild hope, and deep despair. The balance of the story is a candid, emotional exploration of a daughter’s search for solace after tragedy as she tries to understand who her mother truly was, makes peace with her grief, and becomes closer to her father and brothers as her mother’s death forces her to learn more about her mother than she ever knew before.

Review :
“Missing is a profoundly brave memoir. Harrison has scoured the painful parts of her history to come to a complicated and compassionate understanding of her mother's fate. The book is as gripping as it is tragic, as moving as it is hot-to-the-touch. I couldn't put it down.” –Robin Romm, author of The Mercy Papers and The Mother Garden “Intensely personal...vivid on the page, [about] a mother who desperately loved and needed her children….A well-written account by a youthful author who is bouncing back from grief.” –Kirkus “Lindsay Harrison and I happen to share the same last name, and we share something more important, the untimely deaths of our mothers when we were too young to withstand or even understand so profound a loss. Missing is a meticulous chronicle of shock and grief; the story that unfolds is one that that waits for nearly all of us, an account of what we fear and will someday face—this isn't a book just for daughters, but for sons, mothers, and fathers, as well.” —Kathryn Harrison