Missing mom : a novel

SUMMARY: last time Last time you see someone and you don't know it will be the last time. And all that you know now, if only you'd known then. But you didn't know, and now it's too late. And you tell yourself How could I have known, I could not have known. You tell yourself. This is my story of missing my mother. One day, in a way unique to you, it will be your story, too. From Joyce Carol Oates comes this candid, intimate, engaging, and personal new novel. Nikki Eaton, single, thirty-one, sexually liberated, and economically self-supporting, has never particularly thought of herself as a daughter. Yet, following the unexpected loss of her mother, she undergoes a remarkable transformation during a tumultuous year that brings stunning horror, sorrow, illumination, wisdom, and even—from an unexpected source—a nurturing love.

Nikki Eaton, single, thirty-one, sexually liberated, and economically self-supporting, has never particularly thought of herself as a daughter. Yet, following the unexpected loss of her mother, she undergoes a remarkable transformation during a tumultuous year that brings stunning horror, sorrow, illumination, wisdom, and even—from an unexpected source—a nurturing love.

The New York Times Book Review - Stacey D'Erasmo

With Missing Mom, Oates turns her considerable force on the conundrum of the absence of an ordinary woman, Gwen Eaton, a 56-year-old housewife in Mount Ephraim, N.Y.…and how that absence ripples through the lives around her…Oates's 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.

Title from e-book title screen (viewed on Oct. 5, 2005)