The much acclaimed—but sadly now shuttered—Andersonville restaurant Passerotto delivered checks to their patrons inside used paperbacks. What a novel idea (forgive me)! While it likely wasn’t their intention, the practice had the potential to introduce diners to new books and new writers. One night my check happened to be delivered in Ben Tanzer’s Lost in Space and I have been orbiting Tanzer and his work ever since.
Tanzer’s latest is The Missing, a harrowing novel about parenting, loss, the long shadows cast by our past selves, and the ways we know and don’t know our loved ones. After their only daughter Christa goes missing, Gabriel and Hannah become involuntary empty nesters, forced to reckon with their own faults and how each may have contributed to Christa’s disappearance. By alternating their points of view, Tanzer explores how our individual experiences of the same event can vastly differ and are often muddled by the fallibility of memory. Sure, this is dark territory, but the novel is punctuated with lightness and humor and propelled by a crucial question for those who have endured a life-altering event, which is to say all of us: how do we live now?
I sent Tanzer some questions over email. Because he’s one of the nicest and most thoughtful guys in the literary world, he sent back some nice and thoughtful answers about a range of topics including the process of crafting dual points of view, the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the inevitability of turning into our parents.
Jeremy T. Wilson
I’d like to know more about the process of writing this novel. Did you write it as it appears, taking turns with each narrative like a tennis match? Or did you write each of their stories on their own?
Ben Tanzer
I’m fascinated by the idea that one might write something like this book as two separate stories, which then need to be integrated. What would that even look like? Anyway, I wrote it as it appears. I had this loose idea about how it would start and finish and some thoughts on what could happen in between and started writing to that—which is how I always write, though in this case, there were alternating points of view. What I needed to decide after each chapter was whether the chapter which follows would reflect what the other protagonist’s take was on what happened on the prior pages or whether they were off doing something else. Regardless, I always sought some key word or phrasing to link the chapter emotionally or psychically to that which preceded it. It seemed important to do so in terms of flow, but also working from the idea that these people aren’t just connected but tethered to one another—and that doesn’t change no matter what’s going on in their lives.
Jeremy T. Wilson
The novel spends a great deal of time reckoning with the past, providing accounts of seminal events in each of the characters’ lives. But sometimes they interpret these events differently. Is every event from the past tainted by our recollection of it?
Ben Tanzer
I would suggest we can’t accurately portray any event from our past—we tell and retell these stories to ourselves and others and they change as we do. People share their versions of the stories, we live new stories that may feel like previous stories, we repeat patterns, and we look to protect ourselves from bad feelings—and so memories are tainted from the moment they happen, and yes, our recollections are compromised. In terms of this novel, you have two people who’ve shared a connection for so long even the stories they share together are impacted by the things listed above, though more importantly, these experiences still come from a place where it’s still their version of events even when sharing the same experience. We bring our stuff—gender, past experiences, childhood, pain, trauma, disappointments, anger, hopes, and dreams to every moment and in every memory. How can two people do that in the same way through the same lens? They can’t.
Jeremy T. Wilson
One of the novel’s central questions is how we continue our day-to-day lives in the aftermath of absence and loss. Our loved ones are here one minute and gone the next. Heavy stuff. But there are also moments of humor. Was this balance purposeful or more of a result of the process or somewhere in between?
Ben Tanzer
I believe there’s a level of humor I bring to all my work—and my work is influenced by a variety of artists ranging from the Beastie Boys to Samantha Irby, who themselves consistently strike a balance between the serious and humorous. On my part, sometimes it’s a conscious effort—with my essay collection Lost in Space, I edited with the idea that every sad or discouraging moment had to be balanced by something funny. The Missing is an example where it wasn’t a conscious effort, except in my conscious desire to capture what life looks like day to day and moment to moment. Something we experience when someone is gone or there’s grief is to find things to laugh about and at times we make jokes to feel better even when we feel bad doing so. That’s the lightness in this book. There’s grief and it can be overwhelming—it just doesn’t have to overwhelm all things—even if we might prefer it to or believe it should.
Jeremy T. Wilson
Horror writers often say that writing horror is a way of looking directly at their fears and confronting them through writing. The great fear of becoming empty nesters is that there will be nowhere left for the parents to put their energy, and with the children gone, they will realize they have nothing in common anymore. Was the act of writing this a way to process some of your deepest fears about marriage and children and the future?
Ben Tanzer
First off, big yes, all the yeses—whatever applies. Still, I want to offer you a more layered response than just yes. The Missing is a marriage book, where the child is a ghost—she’s missing, present, yet not. In that way, the story is one built on the fears I have as a parent—not merely one’s child running away, but all of them—childhood leukemia, porch parties, drunk drivers, and on and on—which aren’t necessarily the fears I have as a married person. I haven’t been worried about being an empty nester. I’ve been looking forward to it, both in terms of less child stuff and more spouse and free time. That said, I was interested in exploring what it looks like for a couple who has centered their energy and more important, their stability on parenting, which has allowed them to not focus on what else is required for balance and healthy coping. I never thought of the book as one about empty nesting, though that keeps coming up. Empty nesting has always had a more positive connotation to me and I’m not sure that applies here. On the other hand, it’s very much a book about fear, and so while I didn’t think of it as a horror story either—or myself as being capable of writing a good horror novel, that keeps coming up as well—it feels like a horror novel to me now and I really love that.
Jeremy T. Wilson
How did Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the space shuttle Challenger tragedy become so important to the novel?
Ben Tanzer
In different ways, these are seminal milestones in my childhood and adolescence. Close Encounters is illustrative of the idea that there may be things bigger than us, which don’t make sense and can’t. What do we do when we recognize that? Also, it’s a movie about obsession and trying to make sense of how one manages that. In the case of Close Encounters, this obsession becomes more important than the protagonist’s family, which resonated too. As for the Challenger tragedy, it’s one of the first events of any kind that people around me seemed to have been collectively impacted by, and so that also resonates as I try to find the moments that stick or are sticky. Plus, there was a girl I was involved with then—or soon to be, who seemed so devastated by it, and her reaction heightened the sense that it meant something—it was almost feral. Though also note here, in terms of the memory thing, that same girl was highly affected by the death of a teacher we both loved and I wonder if I might not have merged those events together.
Jeremy T. Wilson
Early in the novel, Hannah asks: “Didn’t I vow to do this differently than my parents?” The entire time I was reading, I kept thinking of the Philip Larkin poem “This Be The Verse”: They fuck you up, your mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do. Are we destined to turn into our parents?
Ben Tanzer
We are! Which I suppose can be the whole answer to the question. Period. But I’m a writer and the son of a therapist, so I’ll continue… yes, we become our parents and may even marry them if we’re not careful and marriage is your thing. One thing I find fascinating about this is how tortured everyone is by this reality. I was once more tortured by it myself, now I find it entertaining and embrace it for the material it provides. That said, I recall a particularly intense therapy session I was in where it was clear to me that a certain feeling I was having was related to my father and the therapist wanted me to say that and I didn’t want to—or maybe I just thought he wanted me to say it. Either way I finally said, is it really all about my father? The therapist said, yes—and it always is. So, there’s that. I also want to add a caveat or addendum to this response: the scene you reference above is both a comment on how one becomes their parents, and the moment one realizes that despite one’s best efforts one can’t do the life thing much better than your parents did whether you become them or not. That’s a tough pill to swallow.
Jeremy T. Wilson
Gabriel says: “I don’t have meaning in my life, and I don’t know how to find it.” How do we find it?
Ben Tanzer
On the one hand, trying to find the meaning in our lives is a losing game because the meaning keeps changing as we do, and we’re always changing. It’s how life works, and so the trap for someone like Gabriel—for most of us—is not understanding this. The goal is to be as present as one can be, not too attached to the past, as my characters tend to be, nor too focused on the future, as I tend to be. That’s the real achievement. That and seeking to understand our why—not why we’re here, but why we get out of bed in the morning at all, what we’re passionate about, and how we pursue it. We can put a lot of pressure on our why being something important and meaningful to the universe, but I would suggest we have to start with ourselves. What brings us energy and how do we make that mean something to us every day? Meaning results from being the best versions of ourselves. This takes work, of course, yet the pay-off—which is finding contentment and at least a modicum of equanimity—is worth it.
FICTION
by Ben Tanzer
7.13 Books
Published on March 21, 2024
