Missing Women [June Spence]

Update Dec 18, 2023: unsure why this basic response for my college writing class with E.H. has gotten more views than anything on this blog, or why the blog has been operating since I was 16 (~2006) but stagnated at 60,000 views over 10 years ago

...wanted to make a note of it somewhere...

***

Missing Women by June Spence is extremely eerie, and reminds me of a recent TV show called Happy Town. It was a terrible show, but it revolved around these missing people and the community they were taken from. The use of the second person is a really interesting twist on turning the actual protagonist of the story into the reader him or herself. It’s alienating, and meant to be. If there is an “us” there has to be a “them”. In this case, “them” is sometimes the women, and mostly the unknown in general. The dark fear of unanswered questions.

            The way Spence illustrates each individual woman’s characteristics is imaginative as well. It isn’t coming from the mouth of police experts, it is town gossip. It’s the juicy culmination of details from friends and family. No one knows the real story – where they were that night. If the girls had really been fighting or if they made up. In essence, even though the characters progress despite their absence (Adelle goes from perfect innocent to elitist anti-social) we really know just as much about them at the end as we do in the beginning. No amount of speculation can locate them. No character analysis can know if they are alive or dead. It’s dark and extremely deep.

            I often like to figure out what sparked an idea in a writer’s mind – what single moment lead to the creation of this story. Here, I bet it was the “Have you seen us?” sign. I bet Spencer saw that and a whole flood of possibilities came to her mind – including writing a story in the second person plural.

            This choice raises so many more questions than if it had been written any other way. Just what are we obsessed with when we talk about things on the news? Aren’t we really exploiting people somehow because it reflects something in us. Spencer even hints that these three women could be any woman in any town in America – and the audience, the reader, wants it that way.

            We never get into the women’s heads. We always have the filter of speculation. Did they run away? The mom may have been involved in drugs, and the daughter may have been pregnant, and the friend may have been a failing neurotic – but we can never know – and that distance makes it even more intriguing somehow. It’s the way of the world today , the world of celebrity – we want to make people into who we want them to be.