Missing Men: A Memoir

Rating:
Summary: sadly and sweetly written
Review: Joyce Johnson's "Missing Men" is a wrenchingly sad account of her life, coming of age in 1950s Bohemia. An only child, she details her mother's unhappy journey as an orphan who made a late and unfulfilling marriage and who became a "stage mother," lavishing her daughter with love.

Joyce Johnson broke away from the homelife that stifled her, and gave her heart, several times, to abstract artists: This book is about blankness and absence. Although she writes without excessive self-pity, nevertheless bleakness, sorrow, and longing permeate its pages. There is little here about her successful career, her life in publishing, which might mitigate the wistful tone of her memoir.

Rating:
Summary: Don't Judge a Book By Its Cover
Review: "Missing Men" is a terrific memoir, tender and tough. Johnson writes with honesty and great precision about fear and foreboding, about peach brandy, about grief, and downtown New York and especially about art. While many reviewers praise the first part of the book (Joyce-and-mama, Joyce-and-I-Remember-Mama), absorbing as it is, it's the end of the book I like best: her descriptions of artist Peter Pinchbeck's life and work. Lucid writing about art and artists is rare. Honesty about living a woman's life is too. "Missing Men" gives you both. It's moving, serious stuff.

Rating:
Summary: Don't Judge a Book By Its Cover
Review: "Missing Men" is a terrific memoir, tender and tough. Johnson writes with honesty and great precision about fear and foreboding, about peach brandy, about grief, and downtown New York and especially about art. While many reviewers praise the first part of the book (Joyce-and-mama, Joyce-and-I-Remember-Mama), absorbing as it is, it's the end of the book I like best: her descriptions of artist Peter Pinchbeck's life and work. Lucid writing about art and artists is rare. Honesty about living a woman's life is too. "Missing Men" gives you both. It's moving, serious stuff.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent first half; second half trails off
Review: I really enjoyed reading about Joyce Johnson's childhood family. What a crew! I enjoyed reading about her life with Jim Johnson -- her descriptions of their marriage made his death really poignant. But I wasn't all that fascinated by Peter Pinchbeck. I realize the book is "Missing Men," but he was just too missing for me. I never really understood him. I would have preferred to know more about her career in publishing and the fascinating people I'm sure she met. But that wasn't the point of the book, I guess. I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading about women's lives.

Rating:
Summary: Missing Something
Review: I was disappointed with "Missing Men." I was expecting to find bits of insight, perhaps a pearl of wisdom here and there, something to connect with and relate to, being an artist, having been a single mother, having loved intensely, surely these were things that connections are made of....and yet I am left with the sensation of this being a fairly dry and remote recital of Johnson's family & relationship history. I felt she was more of an impersonal narrator rather than intimately and emotionally involved with her story. I finished the book wondering why Johnson had written it, what was her point, what did she want to convey to me with her memoirs? What did I gain by reading it? Nothing, I'm afraid. I compare this with "Too Close to the Falls" by Catherine Gildiner... both set in New York, both describing their childhoods (well, I guess that's a prerequiste of a memoir, isn't it)... Johnson's book left me dutifully turning the pages to finish it, to get it over with... just the opposite of Gildiner's book, I hated to see it end. Why did one bore me and another interest me? I have no answer for that, perhaps it's entirely due to my psyche and has nothing to do with the authors. But this is not something I'm adding to my recommended reading list.

Rating:
Summary: Missing Something
Review: I was disappointed with "Missing Men." I was expecting to find bits of insight, perhaps a pearl of wisdom here and there, something to connect with and relate to, being an artist, having been a single mother, having loved intensely, surely these were things that connections are made of....and yet I am left with the sensation of this being a fairly dry and remote recital of Johnson's family & relationship history. I felt she was more of an impersonal narrator rather than intimately and emotionally involved with her story. I finished the book wondering why Johnson had written it, what was her point, what did she want to convey to me with her memoirs? What did I gain by reading it? Nothing, I'm afraid. I compare this with "Too Close to the Falls" by Catherine Gildiner... both set in New York, both describing their childhoods (well, I guess that's a prerequiste of a memoir, isn't it)... Johnson's book left me dutifully turning the pages to finish it, to get it over with... just the opposite of Gildiner's book, I hated to see it end. Why did one bore me and another interest me? I have no answer for that, perhaps it's entirely due to my psyche and has nothing to do with the authors. But this is not something I'm adding to my recommended reading list.

Rating:
Summary: A Very Dear Book
Review: It's 2am and I meant to be in bed by 10 tonight but couldn't put Missing Men down until it was done. And now it is done, and I'm sad that it is.

Like Minor Characters and In the Night Cafe, two other truly wonderful books, Joyce Johnson writes so personally that the book's end feels like the end of a visit with a dear friend, a friend you see much too rarely. She captures so well that hunger to replay life's moments -- painful and joyous both, over and over like a song, as she put it -- to feel what they have meant, to hear them right, to savor and take them inside you and somehow keep living them long after they're gone.

And she shares the scary lack of fulfilling resolution when the little enlightenments don't simply add up to resolution and love. She doesn't hide her fear of dying alone, and the three books of hers that I have read all bring me home to my own fear of this too. And that's something so few writers have the courage or ability to really share. And that's very honest. And that's something very dear.

Rating:
Summary: Quiet Perfection
Review: Once again Joyce Johnson speaks for legions of women who have made their lives around men and then learned other ways to live. Her writing is utterly unpretentious and perfectly precise. She captures emotions, people, and places with telling details and a straight face. This book proves that you don't have to live a lurid or strange life to write a great memoir. It also has one of the best jackets I have ever seen.