Missing

Book excerpt: A beautifully written, intensely poignant memoir that looks at grief, family dynamics, and what happens when your world comes crashing down. 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.