#Promo for the intriguing #Memoir – Missing by Cornelia Spelman

Looking for something very different to read?
This memoir could be just what you need!
A search into a family's past,
Looking for clues and speculating at last.
What happened to this author's mother
And to her elder brother?
Looking for evidence to reveal what may be true
Sharing it all now with you....

Acclaimed children’s book author Cornelia Maude Spelman’s memoir of her family springs from a meeting and subsequent friendship with the late, legendary New Yorker editor William Maxwell in the 1920s. When Spelman hints at what she thinks of as the failure of her parents’ lives, he counters that “in a good novel one doesn’t look for a success story, but for a story that moves one with its human drama and richness of experience.” Maxwell encourages her to tell her mother’s story at their final meeting. Missing is Spelman’s response to Maxwell’s wisdom.

With the pacing of the mystery novels her mother loved and using everything from letters and interviews to the family’s quotidian paper trail-medical records, telegrams, and other oft-overlooked clues to a family’s history-Spelman reconstructs her mother’s life and untimely death. Along the way, she unravels mysteries of her family, including the fate of her long-lost older brother. Spelman skillfully draws the reader into the elation and sorrow that accompanies the discovery of a family’s past. A profoundly loving yet honest elegy, Missing is complex and beautiful like the mother it memorializes.

Praise for Missing…..

PRAISE FOR MISSING by Cornelia Maude Spelman:

“A long, intimate journey; the very honest accounting of the way old pain works its way through the generations. One of the fascinations of the whole story comes from the vicarious satisfaction of seeing someone who actually does discover every bit of what is still discoverable, and then who dares to speculate with candor about how it all fits together, not to mention how it’s affected her.” –Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After

 “I gobbled the book right up and loved every minute.  I love the details, the interweave, the suspense, the perfect tone of curiosity, enthusiasm, melancholy, wonderment, wistfulness, longing.  What a marvelous book.  It’s as if she tapped all our longing for knowing more about our crazy, mysterious, haunted families.  It’s a book we all can live in.” –Naomi Shihab Nye, author of 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East

“The book reads like a novel…a remarkable emotional history of a family…lovely, real, and handled sensitively.” –Angela Jackson, novelist and Poet Laureate of Illinois

“Missing is an extraordinarily moving account of a daughter’s search for her mother.  The perfectly apt images carry the strong emotional current of the book from beginning to end.” – Kathleen Hill, author of She Read To Us In the Late Afternoons

Cornelia Spelman’s gentle, lyrical prose belies the haunting nature of her story, a searing, honest search for the lost pieces of her family’s story. Missing is a book that both comforts and astounds. It’s memoir writing at its absolute finest. ─Alex Kotlowitz

Cornelia Spelman

Cornelia Maude Spelman M.S.W., is a writer, an artist, and former therapist. She is the author of picture books for children, including a series called “The Way I Feel.” Her work has been translated into ten languages and sold over two million copies worldwide.

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