Elizabeth Is Missing: A Novel, by Emma Healey
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Elizabeth Is Missing: A Novel, by Emma Healey
Read and Download Elizabeth Is Missing: A Novel, by Emma Healey
In this darkly riveting debut novel—a sophisticated psychological mystery that is also an heartbreakingly honest meditation on memory, identity, and aging—an elderly woman descending into dementia embarks on a desperate quest to find the best friend she believes has disappeared, and her search for the truth will go back decades and have shattering consequences.
Maud, an aging grandmother, is slowly losing her memory—and her grip on everyday life. Yet she refuses to forget her best friend Elizabeth, whom she is convinced is missing and in terrible danger.
But no one will listen to Maud—not her frustrated daughter, Helen, not her caretakers, not the police, and especially not Elizabeth’s mercurial son, Peter. Armed with handwritten notes she leaves for herself and an overwhelming feeling that Elizabeth needs her help, Maud resolves to discover the truth and save her beloved friend.
This singular obsession forms a cornerstone of Maud’s rapidly dissolving present. But the clues she discovers seem only to lead her deeper into her past, to another unsolved disappearance: her sister, Sukey, who vanished shortly after World War II.
As vivid memories of a tragedy that occurred more fifty years ago come flooding back, Maud discovers new momentum in her search for her friend. Could the mystery of Sukey’s disappearance hold the key to finding Elizabeth?
Elizabeth Is Missing: A Novel, by Emma Healey- Amazon Sales Rank: #54494 in Books
- Brand: Healey, Emma
- Published on: 2015-06-02
- Released on: 2015-06-02
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .72" w x 5.31" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
Amazon.com Review Kimberly McCreight Emma Healey Kimberly McCreight, author of the New York Times bestselling Reconstructing Amelia, interviews Emma Healey
Kimberly McCreight (KM): One of the things I most admire about Elizabeth is Missing—and there is so much to admire—is the utterly convincing voice of Maud, both in her advanced years and when she is much younger. How did you tackle the challenge of presenting a single character at such disparate times within a single narrative?
Emma Healey (EH): I’m so glad it’s convincing, thank you. I started with Maud’s voice as an eighty-year-old and found that only needed a little adjusting to take her back into childhood. The voice overall is very much based on my mother’s mother, Vera. I was very close to her and she had (ironically) a brilliant memory and had lots of stories to tell about her early life. I spent most of my school holidays with her, so remembering and sticking to the kind of words she would have used gave me a guide for Maud’s lexicon. Voice is so much about vocabulary. I do have to say though, I think writing from the point-of-view of a single character, even in two time frames, is much easier than swapping between characters. Reading Reconstructing Amelia, I am amazed at how well you alternate a first-person and third-person narrative, from the point-of-view of a teenager and a mother, as well as using Facebook statuses and text messages, all in one novel. I should be asking you how you made that work so well!
KM: Was there something that drew you to writing about a character losing her grip on reality, particularly one struggling with dementia?
EH: The initial inspiration for the book came from my father's mother, Nancy, who has multi-infarct dementia, but my aunt’s mother-in-law had suffered from Alzheimer’s for several years before that and other members of my family had had various forms of dementia. At the time, dementia wasn’t something that was being talked about so much and I was fascinated (as well as terrified and upset) by the way a person could come and go—one minute their old selves, the next in a world of their own. Their patterns of behavior could be anything from perfectly reasonable to completely bizarre and it seemed like there was a lot more going on under the surface, which was difficult to discover or explain, and this seemed ripe for fictional exploration.
KM: Elizabeth is Missing has such a smooth, flawless structure. You move so nimbly through time, without relying on chapter breaks or some such device to delineate different sections. It works so well that I think any demarcations would have interfered with the story. Can you talk a bit about the decision to include chapters that switch back and forth through time?
EH: Thank you. Again, I’m really glad you think so. The structure happened fairly organically. I felt that a dialogue between current and past events was truer to the way memories work – they break into your immediate thoughts, rather than wait for you to decide to have them – and I wanted the sections to be relatively short in order to mirror the fragmentary experience of dementia. Not dividing the past and present into separate chapters made it easier too to increase the length of the past story as Maud’s preoccupation with it intensified (and as her awareness of the world around her faded), without signaling too heavily to the reader and without losing the thread or balance of either narrative.
KM: Your book is both a compelling emotional story as well as a mystery. Which comes first for you?
EH: I find plotting a book very exciting, and really enjoy trying to weave in narrative strands and tie up all the ends, but I have to feel there is some real experience behind the story, some “truth” that I’m attempting to represent, too. And these two things seem to me to be inextricably linked. It’s much easier to engage emotionally when there is an intriguing story unfolding – a dull character or a character in a dull situation is difficult to take an interest in, even if they are sympathetic. Similarly, for a mystery to work and for the reader to care whether, and how, it is solved, there needs to be a certain amount of emotional investment in the characters and themes.
KM: I couldn’t agree more. There needs to be a constant dialogue between character and story. Trying to achieve that balance is, for me, one of the greatest joys and the greatest challenges of being a novelist. What's your biggest challenge as a writer?
EH: Being a writer means being constantly mentally engaged. This is great in some ways as it’s exciting and gives a context and significance to every aspect of life, but it also means there are no off-duty hours. So anytime I’m not writing (or not observing, listening, note-taking), I’m feeling guilty about it. Justifying writing is sometimes difficult, too: Why this subject? Why this character? But most of all, why me? What can I offer that another writer couldn’t? A terrible question because the answer is invariably nothing.
KM: You’re right, that “why” is very important. It inevitably pushes your story to a much stronger place. What's your background? Elizabeth is Missing is such an accomplished debut, I'm assuming—okay, maybe hoping—there was some writing that came before it. Otherwise, I might be far too jealous.
EH: Ha ha! Well, I wrote lots of bits of things, of course, but I hadn’t really finished anything before Elizabeth is Missing. My first degree was in Book Arts, and the course did offer a Creative Writing module, but I was too shy to take it. Instead, I learned how to sew pages together and foil block and print. I was always an avid reader though, and I began to take short courses in writing and editing after I graduated and started the novel while I was working in an art gallery in London. I also found a workshop group, which was brilliant and gave me the confidence to experiment and find Maud’s voice. Eventually, I went back to university to get my MA in Creative Writing at UEA.
KM: Well, I certainly can’t wait to see what you do next. Best wishes with Elizabeth is Missing. It’s such a wonderful book.
From Booklist *Starred Review* Your best friend doesn’t respond to calls or knocks on the door. A moving van is loaded with your friend’s possessions. Your friend’s son, a nasty, grasping type, seems to have taken over. You report what’s going on to the police, to your daughter, to anyone who will listen. No one believes you. You hardly know whether to believe yourself since you know that your memory, lately, has gotten so bad. This is the predicament facing Maud Horsham, a woman who survived the London Blitz and is now sinking into dementia. Part of the wallop of this mystery is that a woman with declining memory and mental powers is placed in the position of detective. This adds to the urgency of her quest, since Maud is battling the condescension of her caretakers, the police, and her daughter as her faculties fade. Another part of the power of this debut novel is that Maud is the narrator; this choice of point of view gives readers a lens on the casual cruelties inflicted on the aging, especially those with dementia. Maud writes everything down, to help her remember clues about her missing friend, and she also writes down how she is treated. Maud focuses on a second mystery as well, the disappearance of her sister, Sukey, after the war. Part mystery, part meditation on memory, part Dickensian revelation of how apparent charity may hurt its recipients, this is altogether brilliant. --Connie Fletcher
Review “[A] knockout debut…. Ms. Healey’s audacious conception and formidable talent combine in a bravura performance that sustains its momentum and pathos to the last.” (Wall Street Journal)“Maud Horsham, the narrator of Emma Healey’s spellbinding first novel…is aware that she’s slipping into dementia…. It’s a sad and lonely business watching your identity slowly slip away. But even at the end, Maud insists on making herself heard and understood.” (New York Times Book Review)“Part mystery, part meditation on memory, part Dickensian revelation of how apparent charity may hurt its recipients, this is altogether brilliant.” (Booklist (starred review))“A thrillingly assured, haunting and unsettling novel, I read it at a gulp.” (Deborah Moggach, author of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel)“Elizabeth Is Missing is every bit as compelling as the...hype suggests.... The novel is both a gripping detective yarn and a haunting depiction of mental illness, but also more poignant and blackly comic than you might expect.” (The Observer, (London))“A compelling read, Elizabeth is Missing offers added depth of mystery and suspense along with aptly portraying a family trying to cope with illness.” (New York Journal of Books)“Elizabeth is Missing will stir and shake you: an investigation into a seventy-year-old crime, through the eyes of the most likeably unreliable of narrators. But the real mystery at its compassionate core is the fragmentation of the human mind.” (Emma Donoghue)“Ingeniously structured and remarkably poignant…. A riveting story of friendship and loss that will have you compulsively puzzling fact from fiction as you race to the last page.” (Kimberly McCreight, New York Times bestselling author of Reconstructing Amelia)“This is no conventional crime novel but a compelling work that crosses literary genres.… The result is bold, touching and hugely memorable.” (Sunday Times (London))“It is a gripping thriller, but it’s also about life and love: the love of an exasperated daughter for her mother; the love of sisters and of friends and the love I felt for Maud.” (The Independent, (London))“Maud’s memory is failing, slipping further away each day. So how can she convince anyone that her best friend is truly missing?…A poignant novel of loss.” (Kirkus Reviews)“This novel genuinely is one of those semi-mythical beasts, the book you cannot put down.” (Jonathan Coe, author of The Rotter’s Club)“British author Healey draws on her own grandmothers’ experiences to create the distinctive narrator of her first novel… an absorbing tale.” (Publishers Weekly)“A gripping mystery…this bears comparison to A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and S. J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep. (The Bookseller, “Ones to Watch”)“Healey is able to imagine and empathize on such a level because she’s simply a brilliant writer. Let’s hope we hear much more from her over the years.” (BookPage)
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112 of 117 people found the following review helpful. Recommended with noted reservations. By Russell Fanelli The brief prologue at the beginning of Emma Healey’s novel Elizabeth Is Missing gives us a first and important clue to an important mystery which is at the heart of this sad story. Maud Horsham finds the cover of a compact in a garden belonging to her friend Elizabeth that belonged to her sister Sukey seventy years ago. Sukey went missing and was never seen again. Her mother, father, and younger sister Maud searched everywhere for her and failed to ever find out what happened to her.Now Maud is in her 80’s and at the start of the novel we see her experiencing the first stages of dementia. She is able to live at home with care takers coming in each day to help her do the simple things that now become complicated when a person begins to lose his or her memory. Maud has taken it into her head that her friend Elizabeth is missing. Even though she is told by everyone that Elizabeth is not missing, Maud refuses to believe that her friend is safe. She becomes well known at the local police station. The officers are friendly, humor her, and send her on her way. She takes out an advertisement in the local paper asking for information about the whereabouts of Elizabeth. This draws the ire of Elizabeth’s son who tries to convince Maud that Elizabeth is all right. Nothing works. Throughout the entire novel Maud is relentless in attempting to find her lost friend.Much more complicated is the enduring mystery of what happened to her sister Sukey. Throughout the novel we flash back to that earlier time at the end of World War II when Sukey disappeared. Young Maud becomes a detective seeking out clues to what happened to Sukey. Seventy years later she continues to be deeply disturbed by the fact that Sukey was never found. Maud’s search for her missing friend Elizabeth uncovers information about Sukey that eventually helps to solve the puzzle of her disappearance.For readers of this review, it may sound like Elizabeth Is Missing is a murder mystery, but that would not be correct. Instead, for three hundred pages we watch Maud slowly lose her mind. From simply being forgetful at the beginning of our story, by the end she no longer recognizes her own daughter and granddaughter. Maud is obsessed with trying to find her friend Elizabeth and we readers are as uncertain as she is about what happened to Elizabeth. For me this is a serious problem with the novel. On the one hand, the disappearance of her sister Sukey is real, but what about Maud’s relentless pursuit of information about Elizabeth? I was most unhappy about the resolution of this important question.What I liked best about this novel was Emma Healey’s ability to show us the gradual decline of a person suffering from dementia. I have never read anything as real or convincing as her descriptions of everyday life for a person slowly losing her mind. Through her skill as a writer, Emma Healey brings Maud to life for us and her portrayal of this sick woman is a truly unhappy story. As mentioned, much less successful is the resolution of what happened to Maud's friend Elizabeth. When I finally discovered the answer to this question, I was disappointed that so much build up would yield such an unsatisfying result. Recommended with noted reservations.
56 of 58 people found the following review helpful. Could be dangerous reading for those of us who are in their 80's By Neal Reynolds Hey, this is serious stuff. It's primarily the story of Maud who narrates the story as she becomes increasingly demented. That's heavy fare for those of us in our 80's who could be drifting into old age dementia. I'm saying this half kiddingly with a smile on my face, but we might not really need to read a novel that takes us into the world of the demented.All in all, this is a powerful novel and younger folks with parents or grandparents may gain considerable insight from this. It should be said, as one reviewer already has, this isn't really a mystery as it's categorized here at Amazon. It's more of an emotional and sad journey into the mind of a woman losing her mental capabilities. It is indeed heavy stuff.
76 of 82 people found the following review helpful. Enjoyable read...except for the part where you want to kill yourself before you get too old By Dave Astle This book was very unique and original. Maud is completely lovable, though slightly repetitive. While I enjoyed the book very much, it also scared the living bejeezus out of me. This isn't a horror story, though. This is a story of Maud, an eighty-two year-old woman with Alzheimer's. She is convinced that her friend Elizabeth has gone missing, in spite of being told regularly that she has not. Maud writes herself notes to remind herself what's going on. Most of the notes remind her that Elizabeth is missing. Though she has a hard time remembering anything in the present, Maud frequently flashed back to when she was a young girl, when her sister Sukey went missing. She has a hard time recognizing her daughter, she's not sure what many things are called, but she remembers the past with no problem. Sometimes Maud confuses the past with the present, which in the end, results in a murder being solved. Go, Maud! My biggest takeaway from this book is that I really, really don't want to get old.
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