The Day That Went Missing: A Family's Story

by Richard Beard

Overview

"Spellbinding, terrifying, deeply moving" — an unflinching portrait of a family's silent grief, and the tragic death of a brother not spoken about for forty years (Joanna Rakoff).

On a family summer holiday in Cornwall in 1978, Richard and his younger brother Nicholas are jumping in the waves. Suddenly, Nicholas is out of his depth. One moment he's there, the next he's gone.

Richard and his other brothers don't attend the funeral, and incredibly the family returns immediately to the same cottage — to complete the holiday, to carry on, in the best British tradition. They soon stop speaking of the catastrophe. Their epic act of collective denial writes Nicky out of the family memory.

Nearly forty years later, Richard, an acclaimed novelist, is haunted by the missing piece of his childhood, the unexpressed and unacknowledged grief at his core. He doesn't even know the date of his brother's death or the name of the beach where the tragedy occurred. So he sets out on a painstaking investigation to rebuild Nicky's life, and ultimately to recreate the precise events on the day of the accident.

The Day That Went Missing is a transcendent story of guilt and forgiveness, of reckoning with unspeakable loss. But, above all, it is a brother's most tender act of remembrance, and a man's brave act of survival.

Winner of the PEN/Ackerley Prize 2018

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316445382
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	11/06/2018
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.88(w) x 8.62(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Richard Beard's six novels include Lazarus is Dead, Dry Bones, and Damascus, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. In the UK he has been shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award and longlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award.

His latest novel, Acts of the Assassins was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2015. He is also the author of four books of narrative non-fiction. Formerly Director of The National Academy of Writing in London, he is a Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo, and has a Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia.

What People are Saying About This

author of My Salinger Year - Joanna Rakoff

“Spellbinding, terrifying, deeply moving, Richard Beard’s The Day That Went Missing is a masterpiece. Fueled by Beard’s dark humor and lacerating intelligence, this ferociously original memoir examines the ways in which we create mythologies to help us cope with unbearable tragedy. I basically stopped breathing on page one and didn’t start again until I’d reached the book’s devastating conclusion.”

Actor and author of Born with Teeth - Kate Mulgrew

“Richard Beard writes with the urgency and simplicity that attend a profound relationship with grief, and in his struggle to understand his brother's death he uses prose that rivets our attention, even as he both savors and examines a wound he knows he will carry with him until the end of time.”

Editorial Reviews

The reader is carried along on the twists and turns of the inquest, from the basics (the date, the beach, the rental house) to Beard's ineffectual research (he loses his map, interrupts during interviews) to the profound (the discovery of a lost story), so that the book is not only a memoir but a chronicle of how lost memories can be recovered. It is a memoir that reveals the mechanism of the form itself…This is a story of a man trying to feel and succeeding, we hope, in the end. If the beginning is dense with theory and fact gathering, the later part of the book swells with meaning and revelation. Beard cops to his own guilt and sadness and the memories themselves, after much research and focus, become lush and full.

The New York Times Book Review - Lisa Brennan-Jobs

★ 09/03/2018
Beard’s stunning memoir tells the tragic story of his family’s 1978 vacation and the subsequent 40 years he spent forgetting it. His memory from the day is fuzzy: he was 11 and his little brother, Nicky, was nine when they decided to play in the waves one last time before heading back to the cottage their family was renting in Cornwall, England. Nicholas drowned, and the rest is blank. His family never spoke about what happened—which he calls “an epic level of denial.” Now a novelist with kids of his own, Beard (Lazarus Is Dead) attempts to piece together what happened that day and hunt down all the artifacts left of his younger brother’s short life. Beard travels across England, visiting the important places from Nicky’s life and interviewing everyone who knew him—family members, school officials, the man who pulled him out of the water that terrible day. But the memories are fuzzy and, after years of silence, some have vanished entirely. By collecting all of Nicky’s school records, photographs, clothing, and stories, Beard reimagines the brother he lost. His beautifully written story is heartbreaking and unforgettable as he struggles with the grief he chose to forget and, now, attempts to remember again. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award


Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize

"Beard, a novelist, takes a deeper look at the worst day of his family's life, when his younger brother drowned during their seaside vacation; the examination is both terribly moving and somehow life-affirming."—Boston Globe

"A memoir of real truth and heartbreaking emotional heft"—Sunday Times

"A touching, painful disquisition on memory and forgetting and the tendrils that tie us to the past."—Guardian

"This haunting book is a profoundly moving study of memory, denial and grief."—Minneapolis Star Tribune

"...heartfelt, heartbreaking and heartless."—Jim Crace, The New Statesman

"Beard's stunning memoir tells the tragic story of his family's 1978 vacation and the subsequent 40 years he spent forgetting it.... [Beard's] beautifully written story is heartbreaking and unforgettable as he struggles with the grief he chose to forget and, now, attempts to remember again."—Publisher's Weekly

"Meticulously crafted and searingly honest, Beard's narrative is at once a story about the long and difficult road to self-forgiveness and a commentary on the wages of British emotional repression. A quietly brooding and intense memoir of family and reckoning with the past."—Kirkus Reviews

"This is a fascinating book, the story of a child's accidental death and how an English family dealt with it - or rather, didn't deal with it. Clear-eyed, very sad, funny at times and, despite the story it tells, ultimately uplifting in its determination to confront buried truths."—Sebastian Faulks, author of Birdsong and Where My Heart Used to Beat

"Spellbinding, terrifying, deeply moving, Richard Beard's The Day That Went Missing is a masterpiece. Fueled by Beard's dark humor and lacerating intelligence, this ferociously original memoir examines the ways in which we create mythologies to help us cope with unbearable tragedy. I basically stopped breathing on page one and didn't start again until I'd reached the book's devastating conclusion."—Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year

"Richard Beard writes with the urgency and simplicity that attend a profound relationship with grief, and in his struggle to understand his brother's death he uses prose that rivets our attention, even as he both savors and examines a wound he knows he will carry with him until the end of time."—Kate Mulgrew, actor and author of Born with Teeth

From the Publisher

2018-09-02

A British novelist and nonfiction writer's account of his struggle to come to terms with the death of a younger brother that his family never fully acknowledged.

In the summer of 1978, Beard (Acts of the Assassins, 2015, etc.) and his family went on a holiday to Cornwall. During their time there, his 9-year-old brother Nicholas died in a drowning accident, which the author witnessed. Instead of mourning his death, however, the family sought refuge in "an epic level of denial." Neither Beard nor his two other brothers attended the funeral. In the weeks and years that followed, Nicholas' name was expunged from all conversations and mementos, including a clock that bore an engraved list of all family members except Beard's dead brother. For almost 40 years the author experienced an anguish he could not understand and that only deepened over time. Desperate to make peace with the incident and his role in it, he began a scrupulously detailed, emotionally wrenching exploration of the events surrounding the tragedy. Both he and Nicholas had been playing together on a remote beach when an undertow swept both away from the beach. Rather than try to save his brother, Beard decided to save only himself. Unrelenting guilt drove him to examine family documents, maps, and newspaper clippings and interview family members, the officials at Nicholas' school, and those involved in the recovery of Nicholas' body. It also forced him to probe his own past and present feelings toward Nicholas, feelings that ran the gamut from affection to jealous disdain. In a moment of disturbingly profound insight, he realized that the reason he and his family "refused to believe [that Nicholas] needed his home and family [was] because we'd blocked out those needs in ourselves." Meticulously crafted and searingly honest, Beard's narrative is at once a story about the long and difficult road to self-forgiveness and a commentary on the wages of British emotional repression.

A quietly brooding and intense memoir of family and reckoning with the past.

Kirkus Reviews