Synopses & Reviews
Acclaimed childrens book author Cornelia Maude Spelmans memoir of her family springs from a meeting and subsequent friendship with the late, legendary New Yorker editor William MaxwellIn the 1920s, he and her parents had been friends as undergraduates at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. When Spelman hints at what she thinks of as the failure of her parents lives, he counters that “in a good novel one doesnt look for a success story, but for a story that moves one with its human drama and richness of experience.”
At their final meeting, Maxwell encourages her to tell her mothers story. Missing is Spelmans response to Maxwells wisdom. With the pacing of the mystery novels her mother loved, and using everything from letters and interviews to the familys quotidian paper trail—medical records, telegrams, and other oft-overlooked clues to a familys history—Spelman reconstructs her mothers life and untimely death. Along the way, she unravels mysteries of her family, including the fate of her long lost older brother.
Spelman skillfully draws the reader into the elation and sorrow that accompany the discovery of a familys past. A profoundly loving yet honest elegy, Missing is, like the woman it memorializes, complex and beautiful.
About the Author
Cornelia Maude Spelman is a writer, an artist, and a former social worker. She is the author of picture books for children, includinga series called "The Way I Feel," which has been translated into seven languages.
Table of Contents
Part One: My Mother's Story1. Love, Bill
2. Betrayals
3. Smoke
4. Heirs
5. A Late-Night Thought
6. Paranoia
7. Finding out
8. Records of the Deceased
9. A Second Opinion
10. Finding Frank
Part Two: My Mother's Past
11. Sacred Lands
12. 1918
13. After a Lifetime of Silence
14. Oceans of Love
15. A Sort of Glad, Wild Song
16. Returning
17. Everything's Beautiful
Acknowledgments