A missing person is a story that doesn’t end. We grapple to make sense, to decipher, to make meaning out of something so unfathomable. Jon Billman refers to the “purgatorial underworld of the vanished”, a description that makes great sense to me. The missing are caught in an in-between place, not here but not gone. Stories about missing persons respond to this cultural anxiety, their narratives plotting explanations or recovering and remembering the absent souls, refusing their oblivion.
In my novel Tell Me What I Am a woman goes missing, leaving behind her sister and her four-year-old daughter. They alternately narrate the story of what happened and, I like to think, together engage in act of recovery.
