Kathryn Harrison
The discovery at the heart of Missing Men is not new; instead, it is personal. Lacking any agenda beyond the search for her own truth, Johnson's memoir is quietly successful -- not quiet as in small, but as would be the ideal environment for rumination: uncluttered, well lighted, a high remove offering the benefits of perspective.
— The New York Times
The Washington Post
Unlike so many memoirs in which authors repay the real or imagined grievances inflicted upon them by others, in Missing Men Joyce Johnson reaches out to all these complicated people and thanks them for what they gave her. It is a big-hearted, commonsensical, thoroughly adult book. — Jonathan Yardley
Publishers Weekly
Best known for her chronicles of the beats, Minor Characters and Door Wide Open (with Jack Kerouac), Johnson returns to those times as she retells the story of her life with-and without-the men who mattered most to her, including the grandfather for whom she was named, who committed suicide before she was born. "[M]y life has shaped itself around absences," she writes, "first by happenstance; ultimately, perhaps, by choice." These absences form the structure of this fine memoir. The first section covers Johnson's early years as a child actress and her mother's intense desire for her to make something of herself. It ends with her mother, who goes on to become her "negative muse," poisoning her relationship with her father when she is 12. The second section focuses on Johnson's brief but intense relationship with her first husband, the painter James Johnson, whose early death left her a widow at 27. He left his mark in many ways-from an appreciation that "the difference between life and death... could hang on a few inches" to her last name. Finally, Johnson dissects her short-lived second marriage to artist Peter Pinchbeck and her growing awakening to her own self-worth. Shortly before she leaves him, Johnson thinks, "How was it that I could be important enough to have my name in Newsweek, while at home I was little more than a housemaid?" Her deceptively simple prose cuts through the past, where "memories settled on stuff like dust." Photos. (On sale Apr. 26) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Johnson's Minor Characters, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983, disclosed her relationship with Jack Kerouac and provided a woman's perspective on growing up in the 1950s. In this new memoir, Johnson examines fatherlessness, a theme that permeated most of her life. Her grandfather, an immigrant poet from Warsaw, killed himself when her mother was five, creating an absence that loomed large in the household. Her parents, cautious and conventional, did little to prepare her for what would follow. Attracted to artists but ill suited to the life of an artist's wife, Johnson married two painters, both of whom were fatherless. James Johnson, her first husband, left two sons in Ohio to move to New York. Their seemingly idyllic marriage-the author writing and working in publishing and Jim painting-was cut short when he died in a motorcycle accident, leaving her a widow at 27. Her second marriage, to the artist Peter Pinchbeck, lasted longer and produced one son but was less satisfying. Pinchbeck abandoned his son in the end. What emerges from these reminiscences is another remarkable story of loss and survival, just as intriguing as Johnson's previous memoir. When read together, the two memoirs offer a portrait of a woman interested in both creating and inspiring art. Highly recommended.-Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Perceptive, engaging memoirs of a woman's life shaped around the absence of certain men. For novelist and memoirist Johnson (Minor Characters, 1983, etc.), the first man whose departure affected her life was her cultured grandfather, whose early suicide left his daughter with unrealized artistic longings. A stereotypical stage mother living through her child, she pushed Joyce to become an actress/dancer/composer. From her highly managed childhood, the author skips ahead to the early 1960s, when she was 26. (Presumably because Minor Characters covered Johnson's romance with Jack Kerouac, those years are barely mentioned.) She had already lived with and been left by one painter, and was about to take up with another, James Johnson. Missing men figured in his life, too: he was a fatherless man who had left his own sons behind when he separated from their mother. The sad tale of James and Joyce's love affair and brief marriage, which provided the basis for her novel In the Night Cafe (1989), is set in the lofts and bars of Greenwich Village, where money was scarce, art was abstract, and drinking was heavy. Within a year of his accidental death in 1963, she met and fell for another fatherless Abstract Expressionist, Peter Pinchbeck. Definitely not a family man, Pinchbeck married Johnson only after she became pregnant, assured by her that having a baby around would not change his life as an artist. In understated style she recounts her attempts to keep that promise by supporting herself, her son, and a husband whose paintings did not sell. After five years she left Pinchbeck, began reading feminist writers, found that living alone suited her, and discovered that she could write. Living apartbut still married until he died in 2000, they were more than friends but less than lovers, linked by a son and a past but separated by unbridgeable differences. A memoir of easy grace and lively intelligence, filled with striking portraits of individuals, a time, and a place.
