Now You Are a Missing Person

Susan Hayden’s award-winning, lyrical memoir Now You Are a Missing Person weaves together memories of her rich and varied life since the 1970s, anchored by three devastating losses—her father, a childhood best friend, and her husband. A combination of poetry and prose, with some segments a few scant paragraphs or stanzas and others filling multiple pages, Missing Person is organized into eight parts with evocative headings that cue the reader to the tenor and tone of each aspect of the author’s life and experience as she moves through time and relationships: beginning with “Dislocated,” moving into “Unavailable” followed by “Otherwise Missing,” and finally, “Situated.” And, while grief, loss, and its aftermath are major themes, Hayden’s story is overall one of optimism, hope and gratitude. It is also a fun and entertaining read—not adjectives typically used to describe a memoir with loss at its core. The author uses humor as leavening and sprinkles her passages with glimpses of encounters and friendships with poets, songwriters, and artists of the time (including Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia, the actor Harry Dean Stanton, and Richard Simmons, among others) giving readers an intriguing “behind the scenes” peek into the worlds she inhabited and the varied paths she crossed.

The memoir’s first sentence, in a brief quarter-page segment titled “Outlaws,” cues the reader to what’s to come, introduces Hayden’s distinct, playful voice, and provides enough intrigue to compel turning the page. “I’m an unreliable narrator but I’m asking you to trust me anyway,” she writes, a challenge and an invitation. She then recounts how at age five, she stood in line at the post office, admiring the photos lining the wall, pictures of what she thought must be “the best-looking men on Ventura Boulevard.” When she asks her mom what TV show they’re from, she learns the photos are mugshots, and that these men are wanted criminals. She writes, “They were scruffy and real, and I hated anything that was shiny and anyone who was polished.”

The book jacket aptly describes the memoir as “an intimate album of her life.” References to songs and musicians crop up frequently, adding, in a sense, both a soundtrack to accompany the prose and evocative markers of time and place. In this way, the author creates a vivid sense of setting—historical, societal, pop-cultural, and in terms of the very specific world of parts of Southern California during the ’70s and beyond. In one such snapshot, an early chapter references her father’s love of the Doors song “Riders on the Storm,” of which she writes, “‘Riders on the Storm’ turned me on and terrorized my entire childhood. Pulled me into the land of the Zodiac Killer, HARD LUCK tattooed on the hand of Billy Cook. Look, I wanted to love that song, but I thought it was about murder and I was eight.”

Now You Are a Missing Person is also a compelling, highly relatable coming-of-age story; many readers will find resonance and affirmation of their own lived experience. Raised in an observant Jewish family in the suburban San Fernando Valley, early chapters recount struggles with body image and sexuality, then motherhood and widowhood, and ultimately the discovery that she enjoys her own company, likes who she is and the life she’s led.

In a segment about adolescence, we appreciate both the narrator’s pain and awkwardness, and the author’s light, humorous touch in relating hurtful memories: “The ideal beauty of the era was slender and tan with big boobs and long flowing hair, preferably blonde. I was a Synagogue girl: pale, flat and chubby. I hated exercising. I did own a wardrobe of Danskins that I wore as “regular clothing.” Danskins are not just for dancing.”

In the penultimate chapter, Hayden writes of finding new love, “We are not identical but even with our differences, we are a miracle. He doesn’t have to believe in kismet. He understands the marriage of love and grief.”

Now You Are A Missing Person offers readers an opportunity to visit or revisit the ’70s with a distinctly California lens, through the eyes of a narrator who, though she first introduces herself as an unreliable narrator, reliably delivers a fascinating and colorful genre-fluid memoir. Susan Hayden demonstrates a decided flair for expressive, poetic language and syntax throughout (not confined to the poetry passages). I recommend it to a variety of readers—including memoir lovers, particularly of stories with themes of coming-of-age, struggling to find one’s identity as a woman, and overcoming grief.