Missing Men: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Joyce Johnson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 22, 2004

Joyce Johnson’s classic Minor Characters is valued not only for its portrayal of her relationship with Jack Kerouac but also for its stunning evocation of what it meant to grow up female in the 1950s. In Missing Men, Johnson gives us an even more revelatory self-portrait as she examines—from a unique woman’s perspective—the far-reaching reverberations of fatherlessness.

Born in 1935, she was an orphan’s daughter, named for her grandfather, an immigrant poet from Warsaw who killed himself when her mother was only five. Johnson would marry two artists who were also fatherless. James Johnson died in a motorcycle accident, making her a widow at twenty-seven. Peter Pinchbeck, obsessed with reinventing abstract painting, was unable to commit himself to marriage and fatherhood. Telling a compelling story that has “shaped itself around absences,” Missing Men presents us with the arc and the flavor of a unique New York life—from the author’s adventures as a Broadway stage child managed by her implacable mother to the fateful encounters that later brought her love and ultimately left her to make her way alone as an artist in her own right.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Joyce Johnson has led the kind of life the rest of us only see in novels; who else gets to share a childhood stage with Marlon Brando dressed up as a bear? In her first two works of nonfiction, Door Wide Open and the award-winning Minor Characters, Johnson chronicled a beat coming of age through the lens of her brief relationship with Jack Kerouac. Missing Men fills in the gaps in this bohemian life story even as it highlights them. Fittingly enough for a woman who married two abstract painters, it's a book about negative space. Three extended reminiscences--one for her childhood, one for each of her marriages--tease out the patterns in a life that "shaped itself around absences." Missing men defined those she loved: her iron-willed mother, whose immigrant father killed himself when she was five; her two husbands, each fatherless, each with his own burden of tragedy and rage; Johnson herself, left behind with her freedom and her art. The writing, as always, is lovely and precise. Whether she is recounting the home-sewn dresses of her mother's lonely girlhood or the "metallic sputter" of the old red motorbike that ends her first marriage, Johnson breaks your heart with the tellingly chosen detail. --Mary Park

From Publishers Weekly

Best known for her chronicles of the beats, Minor Characters and Door Wide Open (with Jack Kerouac), Johnson returns to those times as she retells the story of her life with-and without-the men who mattered most to her, including the grandfather for whom she was named, who committed suicide before she was born. "[M]y life has shaped itself around absences," she writes, "first by happenstance; ultimately, perhaps, by choice." These absences form the structure of this fine memoir. The first section covers Johnson's early years as a child actress and her mother's intense desire for her to make something of herself. It ends with her mother, who goes on to become her "negative muse," poisoning her relationship with her father when she is 12. The second section focuses on Johnson's brief but intense relationship with her first husband, the painter James Johnson, whose early death left her a widow at 27. He left his mark in many ways-from an appreciation that "the difference between life and death... could hang on a few inches" to her last name. Finally, Johnson dissects her short-lived second marriage to artist Peter Pinchbeck and her growing awakening to her own self-worth. Shortly before she leaves him, Johnson thinks, "How was it that I could be important enough to have my name in Newsweek, while at home I was little more than a housemaid?" Her deceptively simple prose cuts through the past, where "memories settled on stuff like dust." Photos.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; 1 edition (April 22, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670033103
• ISBN-13: 978-0670033102
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,163,011 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Very Dear Book, September 11, 2004

By 

R. Rhodes "R. Rhodes" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Missing Men: A Memoir (Hardcover)

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.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a sweetheart of a writer, September 26, 2005

By 

Peter Baklava (Charles City, Iowa) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Missing Men: A Memoir (Hardcover)

If you read "Missing Men", no doubt you'll be drawn to Joyce Johnson's other two memoirs, "Minor Characters" and "Door Wide Open". All three books are wonderfully intimate sketches of people and places. Whereas "Minor Characters" and "Door Wide Open" focus on Joyce's friendships with notable personalities within the "Beat Movement"(especially her romantic involvement with Jack Kerouac), "Missing Men" addresses her relationships to her father and her two husbands, artists James Johnson and Peter Pinchbeck.

"Missing Men" is beautifully written. Johnson's economy with language is always worth savoring, tracing scenes which stay with the reader forever--be it gathering apples for a pie with her friends, Jack Kerouac in a sleeping bag in your spare room, or (in this volume) the haunting trip to her deceased husband Peter's pitifully small, loudly-colored house in the country.

Joyce Johnson is simply too good of a writer to miss. Do yourself a favor and go quickly to the nearest bookstore or library to find out for yourself (...or just use that friendly little clicker in your hand.)

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't Judge a Book By Its Cover, July 7, 2004

By 

Ann Dermansky (Englewood, NJ) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Missing Men: A Memoir (Hardcover)

"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.