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    Missing Persons: A Memoir
    Missing Persons: A Memoir
    Missing Persons: A Memoir
    Ebook310 pages4 hours

    Missing Persons: A Memoir

    By Gayle Greene

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    About this ebook

    Missing Persons is a memoir about dealing with death in a culture that gives no help. As the last of her family, Greene’s losses are stark, first her aunt, then her mother, in quick succession. She is as ill-equipped for the challenges of caring for a dying person at home as she is for the other losses, long repressed, that rise to confront her at this time: the suicide of her younger brother, the death of her father. As the professional identity on which she’s based her selfhood comes to feel brittle and trivial, she is catapulted  into questions of “who am I?” and “what have I done with my life?”

    The memoir is structured as an account of her mother's and aunt’s final days and the year that follows, a year in which she reconstructs her life. This is a  powerful story about family, what it means to have one, to lose one, never to have made one, and what, if anything, might take its place. It’s the story of a vexed mother-daughter relationship that mellows with age. It is also a search for home, as the very landscape shifts around her and the vast orchards are dug up and paved over for tract housing, strip malls, freeways, and the Santa Clara Valley, once known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight, is transformed to “Silicon.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Nevada Press
    Release dateOct 18, 2017
    ISBN9780874176469
    Missing Persons: A Memoir
    Author

    Gayle Greene

    Gayle Greene is Professor of Literature and Women's Studies at Scripps College, Claremont California. She has published books on Shakespeare, women writers, and scientific issues. Her most recent books are Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change and The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Alice Stewart and the Secrets of Radiation. She is a member of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM), a professional medical society for researchers and clinicians, and is the patient representative on the board of the American Insomnia Association, an organization within AASM.

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      Book preview

      Missing Persons - Gayle Greene

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