Overview

""This is the story of missing my mother. One day, in a way unique to you, it will be your story, too."" So begins Missing Mom, Joyce Carol Oates' personal and candid novel. Nikki Eaton, a single, thiry-one-year-old, sexually liberated and economically self-supporting young woman, never particularly thought of herself as a daughter. Yet following the unexpected loss of her mother, her identity is transformed during the course of a tumultuous year of mourning that brings sorrow, illumination, wisdom, and even--from an unexpected source--a nurturing love.

Full Product Details

9780792738381

Table of Contents

Reviews

""[In this] hypnotic tale of shock and mourning... a violent tragedy hits like a boulder hurled into a pond. Oates tracks every ripple in her empathic drama as she meticulously charts the daunting and transforming process of missing a lost loved one...Oates is at once erotic and scientific in her uncanny detailing of ordinary things experienced under extraordinary circumstances...This almost hallucinatory precision, contrasted with high-voltage encounters with law officials and stricken neighbors and relatives, makes for a profoundly involving and haunting explication of grief, followed, finally, by a renewed embrace of life."" -- ""Booklist"" ""Anna Fields provides a valiant, emotional reading"" -- ""AudioFile"" ""Chronicling Nikki's year following Gwen's death, the novel includes some wonderfully precise emotional observations."" -- ""Publishers Weekly"" ""This time around, Oates, one of America's greatest writers, has not written one of her 'broad views' into American society but rather one of her intimate portraits of family relationships. It may not make a big splash, but loyal fans will want it. Recommended for larger popular fiction collections."" -- ""Library Journal"" ""With Missing Mom, Oates turns her considerable force on the conundrum of the absence of an ordinary woman, Gwen Eaton, a fifty-six-year-old housewife in Mount Ephraim, N.Y....and how that absence ripples through the lives around her...Oates' grip on crime, violence, and the long-buried is sure, but Missing Mom is actually more disturbing in its relentless, dead-on accretion of small-time, small-town, middle-class details. Oates piles them on with pitiless virtuosity."" -- ""New York Times Book Review""

Author Information

Joyce Carol Oates has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestsellers The Accursed and The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University. Kate Fleming (a.k.a. Anna Fields) (1965-2006), winner of more than a dozen Earphones Awards and the prestigious Audie Award in 2004, was one of the most respected narrators in the industry. Trained at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, she was also a director, producer, and technician at her own studio, Cedar House Audio.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available