Missing Persons: A Memoir

Missing Persons is a memoir about dealing with death in a culture that gives no help. Greene goes through two losses in quick succession-first, her aunt’s passing, sudden and unexpected, then her mother’s drawn-out, agonizing death at home. As someone who had never changed a diaper until then, she is spectacularly ill-equipped for the challenges of caring for a dying person. Nor is she prepared to confront other losses, long repressed, that surface at this time: the suicide of her younger brother and death of her father. As the professional identity on which she has based her selfhood comes to feel brittle and trivial, she is catapulted into questions of who am I? and what have I done with my life?

Greene’s memoir is structured as an account of her mother’s and aunt’s final days and the year that follows, a year in which Greene reconstructs her life as even the landscape around her shifts. Her home state of California has beautiful Santa Clara Valley’s vast orchards dug up and paved over for tract housing, strip malls, and freeways-the valley is transformed to Silicon. This becomes an apt parallel in a powerful story about family and home: what it means to have one, to lose one, never to have made one, and what, if anything, might take its place.