Missing Norma

by Rosemary Brosnan 

For several years, all I knew about the novel Norma Fox Mazer was writing is that it was about a sister who disappeared, who went missing. Norma herself was not sure what had happened to the sister: Had she run away? Had she been kidnapped? Would she survive? This novel was not coming easily to her, and for good reason. In 2001, Norma’s daughter Susan had died from brain cancer, and writing was, understandably, proving to be extremely difficult. Here was Norma, missing her daughter so terribly and trying to write about a missing girl. “It seems to me that after her death I was compelled to write about something hard, difficult—you might call it unbearable—and to name that ‘something’ with the three words that name my grief, my loss, my sorrow: the missing girl,” Norma said in an essay that will appear in the paperback version of the book.

The Missing Girl is about five sisters—Beauty, Mim, Stevie, Fancy, and Autumn—and what happens when one is imprisoned in a house by a pedophile. I asked myself many times: How could Norma create such a spot-on portrait of a child molester, conveying his innermost feelings and thoughts with such accuracy? “Which one does he like the best?… He goes back and forth in his mind. This one. That one… It’s only a game. It doesn’t mean anything. He’s only looking.” Norma’s ability to dive into darkness and build suspense—and tell a story not only from the molester’s point of view, but also from the points of view of various sisters—is a testament to her tremendous skill as a writer. The Missing Girl treats a dark subject indeed, but Norma, being Norma, imbued the story with lyrical writing, with hope, and most of all with love—the love the sisters feel for one another.

This was the second novel Norma and I worked on together—the first was Girlhearts—and, as always, working with Norma was easy. No fuss, no muss. As many know, Norma started out as a writer of stories for pulp magazines. Writing was as dear to her as breathing, but it was also her job, and she took it seriously. After I received a draft of The Missing Girl, I sent an editorial letter telling Norma that the manuscript was so wonderful I felt greedy asking for changes. A mere three weeks later, Norma sent back a fabulous revision.  

One of the minor things I asked Norma to think about was changing the name of Faithful, one of the sisters. I kept getting the names Faithful and Fancy mixed up. Faithful had appeared in previous short stories written by Norma, but brilliantly, Norma made the name change an integral part of the story: “[T]he newly fourteen-year-old sister who had just informed the family that she was changing her name from Faithful to Stevie, of all things, was something of a mess… (from now on, my name is Stevie and no one in this family better forget that).” We can see right away what she is like—she knows her own mind, and nobody had better mess with her!

In The Missing Girl and Girlhearts and her other books, Norma wrote with insight and compassion about working class families. I found her characters tremendously refreshing. These are not privileged kids whose greatest problem is what to wear to school. These are kids whose families worry about money, whose fathers are out of work, as Huddle Herbert is in The Missing Girl, whose mothers work as “lunch ladies” in a nursing home, as Blossom Herbert does. The characters often live in a small town in upstate New York. As an Upstate New York girl herself, from Glens Falls, Norma carried this small town setting with her always.

Norma never shied away from tough subjects: she respected her readers, and somehow she never forgot what it felt like to be a teenager. She looked like a perennial teenager, too—with her charming braids and small frame and winning smile. In person and via phone, letter, and e-mail, Norma was always honest— never afraid to talk about how she felt. She was very funny, and always gracious, warm, and loving. Working with Norma was one of the greatest privileges I’ve known as an editor. She had a good soul and a kind heart. I am proud of the work Norma and I did together, but Norma was not only a colleague, she was a dear friend. I am fortunate to have shared this earth with her.