Missing Men: A Memoir

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1: Samuel Rosenberg's Daughters
I once had a husband who started obsessively painting squares - three squares in shifting relationships to each other on what appeared flat ground, colored emptiness. He explained to me that the negative space in his work was as important as the positive

Chapter 1: Samuel Rosenberg's Daughters, Part 2
A month after her death, I reluctantly spent my first day in her apartment dumping old sweaters, yellowed handkerchiefs, and ancient tea towels into plastic garbage bags. In her desk, I found bundles of old letters and papers and a collection of address

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.

Joyce Johnson is the author of three novels, including The Night Café. Her other books include Minor Characters, which was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958..

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