Customer Reviews

Missing Men: A Memoir

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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.

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.)

"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.

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.

Joyce Johnson pays an eloquent tribute to the two men she married in the fifties and early sixties. Both men, Jim Johnson (who died in a motorcycle crash and left Joyce a widow at 27) and Peter Pinchback were, in a sense, "failed" abstract expressionists whose work never was commercially successful. And both were temperamental men who frankly, sounded impossible to live with. Joyce gave her husbands both financial and emotional support, in addition to working full time as an editor and raising a son alone after her marriage with Pinchback ended. Johnson describes a rich artistic life in what now is a lost and faraway world--a grubby, but affordable Manhattan where even impoverished artists could casually move from the Bowery to the East Village or Soho in search of the perfect space. "In those days it was still possible to be gracefully poor in New York," she writes. From what's been written about the lives of artists like Pollack and deKooning, we know what it was like to be a successful painter in New York in the fifties. Johnson's book is valuable in another way; she chronicles what it was like to be part of the second wave of abstract expressionists. These artists were, by and large, ignored by dealers and critics and their fragile careers were dealt a final blow by the conceptual and Pop art movements.

Johnson writes that she was raised in a family of women, mostly without men, and that the emotional absence she experienced in both of her difficult marriages replicated the male absences of her childhood. Ironically, it's Joyce Johnson herself who has achieved the fame and recognition that so eluded both of her husbands. But the loving (and exasperated) portraits she paints of them here show that she is a powerful artist in her own right.

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.

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.

Johnson's recounting of her unusual and multi-faceted growing up is fascinating and full of surprises, but what has stuck with me is her depiction of life with two painters of the void-leaping era, true believers both, and how her own life had to adjust to stay abreast, to catch up, and incorporate that reality.

There's a real sadness in the situation of being an artist and not settling, only to find that the art world is rock hard and finding even a semi-permanent foothold is near to impossible. The art world moves fast and has a way of moving on without you.

I remember Peter Pinchbeck well (never knew him personally but used to see him "around") and knew his work. There are many like him who keep on doing their work and, if they're lucky, get a college gig to keep a little regular money coming in. And, if you're a man, there was usually a woman or two supporting you, helping you along.

It's a testimony to Johnson's strength that she managed to find a way to do her own work even though for many years that work was done along the edges of life, as a wife, mother, and single mother. So much of Johnson's own work deals with the inter-relation/dynamic involving both the supporting woman and the "genius" that must be supported -- a familiar situation during the era of which she writes. I think Johnson's depictions of the struggles involved in living that life are well-told: be it the Kerouac memoir (Minor Characters) or her novel dealing with her first marriage (to another 2nd generation Abstract Expressionist painter) In the Night Cafe.

I do feel that there is something left unsaid in the final portion of Missing Men. But what she did say is eloquent. A cautionary tale maybe: staking too much on one's place in history. Maybe I get that because I'm an artist myself. But if anyone is curious about the process of making art or being near that process, this is a very interesting window into some of the aspects.

If you enjoy the genre of memoir---and especially like reading about the art world, the 1950s and 60s, and the lives of women---you should thoroughly enjoy this book. Joyce Johnson writes with real intimacy---she truly draws the reader into her life---and leaves you at the end wishing for more. Perhaps she will write one more memoir---about her life in publishing. We can all hope!

Unlike some of the other reviewers, I didn't find this book sad or wistful--just honest and affecting. Joyce Johnson is a gifted writer and her choice of words and descriptions always seems perfectly on the mark. I'm just left wishing that her three memoirs were longer---and more plentiful.

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.