By Alice Kaltman
Over the course of the last few months, I’ve had the great privilege (and tons of fun) tossing questions at Ben Tanzer about his astonishing new novel The Missing. Ben has managed to write a wholly original narrative about love, loss, parenting, trauma, ambivalence, shame, joy, and…well, just about every other authentic emotion known to us humanoids. The Missing is told from the perspective of long-married couple Gabriel and Hannah after their teenage daughter Christa goes missing. In alternating sections filled with ruminative often painful self-searching, a familial story unfolds that is entirely believable and down to earth. There’s something in this book for everyone, whether they like it or not. And it is a book that only as skilled and deeply empathic a writer as Ben Tanzer could ever craft. Read on for his deep answers to my queries:
Alice Kaltman: The Missing: WHAT a title. Can you talk to me about the multiple meanings of that term and how you play with them in this astonishing book? I see it here at every turn; mothers missing, children missing, missed connections, emotional voids/missing feelings, missed opportunities.
Ben Tanzer: Let me start by thanking you for reading the book and for tackling this interview. In terms of all the missing, the overarching thread is we meet a couple and immediately know their child is missing…and missing by choice, she left with an older boyfriend and doesn’t want to be found or contacted. One thing the parents/protagonist’s struggle with is what they missed – how did they fail to better understand their daughter, her life and relationship to them and this guy they don’t think much of, her friends, their own parenting, and themselves. What are they missing? As you point out, we learn both parents have had people, parents, missing from their lives, and the resulting sense of disequilibrium and how these things reverberate forward across time, shadows and at times overshadows their lives. These childhood absences further leave them lacking – or missing, key elements necessary for being the healthy adults they might have been – trust, feeling safe, communication skills. At times during their marriage the protagonists have also been missing for one another, and one question among many they – and the reader will face, is can they be there for one another even as they lack the healthy coping skills one needs to manage their confusion, grief, and fear – they certainly possess all the unhealthy ones.
AK: Let me say that as in all your previous and brilliant works of fiction (Readers of this interview, you MUST read Orphans and Upstate, as well as The Missing), your ability to delve into the minds of your characters, is astounding. You’re also a seasoned memoirist (Be Cool, Lost in Space). Do you think your ability to turn the mirror on yourself is part of what makes you so good at creating these narratives of, dare I say, agitated contemplation? And is one sort of writing different, harder, more…whatever, than the other for you?
I feel like you craft interiority so brilliantly with The Missing. Hannah and Gabriel take deep self-scrutiny to a whole other level. Can you tell me what compelled you to write this narrative of shared damaged goods? And particularly, how and why the double perspective?
BT: Agitated contemplation, awesome, I now know how to better frame my work and characters, and what I’m putting on my tombstone. So, first, thank you for that, the kind words and plugging my previous work, and second, I believe that ability to turn the mirror on myself in nonfiction and fiction is an outgrowth of how I spend the day regardless of what I’m focused on. Which is to say I’m fairly obsessed with trying to make sense of things, emotional things certainly – how things work, how one solves problems, how one can communicate most effectively, how one copes. I’ve always had a lot going on inside my head, though when I was younger I was able to somewhat effectively suppress or not confront all the voices, questions, and anxieties. I was alive in the world – running around, reading, consuming everything I could, an observer of all things at all times – and I’m the child of a therapist, so I had the tools, but I didn’t fully use them. When I decided to drink less, start to write, go to therapy, dig in, and became a father, which was a whole emotional explosion that could not be contained – it was all right there waiting for me – the raw nerve endings, reflections, bad feelings, good feelings, pain, anger, stories, even some semblance of balance. With writing then, the nonfiction is a conscious effort to reflect what’s happening in my head back out and into words, with layers and answers, and the fiction is similar, yet different in one significant way – the fictional characters do things I choose not to do, say things I wouldn’t say, give into impulse and urges I do not – while the damage they’ve experienced is also more profound. Further, my characters may be self-aware, but they’re unable to act, are more emotionally compromised, and not the most reliable narrators of their own narratives – the violence, pain, grief, and trauma they experience is too visceral and much harder for them to suppress, so much harder to escape or make sense of too.
Also kind and I really do love writing interiority, it’s my chosen headspace and a place I most enjoy mucking around in. What I know is that I was interested in crafting a longitudinal narrative about how a marriage can look and work over time, good, bad, why people stay in marriage, what love looks like, dealing with illness and affliction, our own childhoods, and how these things change, transform, and warp. My feeling is that most of us are damaged goods and how couldn’t we be – we’re human and alive and so much of life is so fucked and feels so beyond our control, scary, and sad – which I say as someone who recognizes how blessed and privileged I’ve been. Still, I’ve experienced chaos, fear, violence, trauma, grief, suicidal ideation, and why not dig into trying to make sense about what all that looks and feels like? Further, if it’s going to be explored via a marriage, how can’t I try to explore both perspectives and head spaces on that marriage – where and how they dovetail and deviate, and what it further feels like to try and make sense of that – or not? What allowed me to focus on going deeper with such a story, was when my agent said, you have a series of ideas or events here, choose one – the daughter who runs away, that’s a hook, and when I saw how much depth, detail, and potential self-destruction awaited me with that one instigating incident I had a lens that allowed me to push harder – that event could be a tragedy, or at least something that feels inescapable – and when one feels trapped and confused the possibilities as a writer feel endless as well.
AK: Well, your agent might call the daughter who runs away a ‘hook’, but you’ve made that one plot point into so much more. One thing I loved about this book was that it stayed away from just being an angst-ridden missing child mystery. There are so many more layers. So many more threads. Speaking of threads; I want to shift away from content for a moment and talk about craft. I really loved how from section to section you give us a turn of phrase from one narrator that is picked up in the subsequent section by the other. For example, in a conversation Hannah has with her father Ed, Ed says, “I just hope Christa learned how to take care of herself…” and then Gabriel’s section begins with, “Did we raise Christa to take care of herself?”. These repetitions link Hannah and Gabriel in a way they’re not aware of, but we as readers are. How and why did you decide on this storytelling technique, or did it evolve organically?
BT: I will jump into craft in a moment, though first a quick comment on the hook. My agent also said, what are you wanting to do here, are we telling a crime story or something else? When she said that, it seemed clear to me what I wanted to do – and did not. I pictured a story like that in the movie Ransom, where the father somehow knows better than the police how to save his kid and will do anything to do so. That approach makes an unlikely hero of the parent and seeks to create something heart-pounding and thrilling, even if unreal. The latter is fine with me and I enjoy movies and books like that – it was not what I wanted to write though. No heroes and nothing unreal. Which meant to me that the daughter needs to be just old enough where the situation is horrible for the parents and much too real, but not a crime. Having said that, in terms of craft, a juxtaposition I enjoy in the work I respond to – literary, music, art – and try to create myself, is something punk, and lo-fi, maybe scuzzy, raw, feels propulsive, everything bleeding into everything else, yet still somewhat seamless and flowing. I also wanted to craft something that spoke to the sense that we’re all connected – and not necessarily in a spiritual way, though that’s cool, but more in the way that the closer we are to one another the more we feel and experience things in a similar way. This is especially so with parents and children, some couples – there’s an osmosis that occurs over time, something cellular. We may undermine those connections in myriad ways and we’re not always able to communicate about them as we wish we could, but we know it, and other people see it, and I wanted to capture that. That, and the idea that even while we may feel things in similar fashions, our worldviews, experiences, pain, all of it, alter how we come to understand that feeling, our role in the narrative, and even the narrative itself. Ed’s worried about Christa as any grandparent – or human, might be, he’s not necessarily responsible for or an influence on her decisions in the same way a parent is, but he’s worried about her and knows he has failed her in some fashion. Gabriel is the parent, and he’s certain he’s failed her. So, similar feelings, yet different perspectives, different lives. Finally, this sense of linking didn’t happen organically, though I didn’t write the first or even the second draft ensuring those links were in place. I just intended to build them in at some point, and so in terms of craft, it was more a conscious step in my editing process – what to link, what felt important, and what words said it most effectively.
AK: I’m so glad you mentioned Ed, and particularly in relationship to his son-in-law, Gabriel. You’ve got many strong secondary characters in this book, but Ed is my favorite of the bunch. He’s a man of unmined depths, of many contradictions. A gentle soul, but a sturdy one also. There’s a very powerful section in The Missing when Ed, who is sober, takes Gabriel for a run, in an attempt to keep Gabriel from relapsing down the slippery slope of alcoholism, a problem the two men share. Later in The Missing, Gabriel goes for another run on his own, and experiences that transformational, psychological clarity which can occur when a runner is pounding the pavement, the endorphins are surging, and the synapses are firing.
In the past, you and I have discussed how magically productive running can be for our creative processes, how we work out writing problems while running, and often come up with new ideas. So, as a fellow runner (if that’s what I can call my ancient hobbling these days), I love that you’ve given our sport a special place in this book. Can you talk about what running means to you and what you see it meaning in The Missing for both Ed and Gabriel?
BT: I love Ed too and I wonder what kind of narcissism is entailed to love one’s own characters, which is maybe a question you can answer for me. I also love the idea of sturdiness – an underappreciated trait that my mother and maternal grandfather both possessed in droves, or at least having sturdy people around you, and I tend to believe everything is easier when we do. The everything being whatever it means to be alive. You zeroing in on running nicely ties in with your previous question, in that little in my life is more organic than the intersection of writing and running, though even the individual acts of running and writing themselves are organic on their own – born as they were from some kind of impossible to ignore urge. There is a kind of baked-in balance and euphoria that I’ve found with both, which was further elevated by the validation I received in both cases when I was younger and speaks to my own insecurities and maybe some other kind of narcissism? Or ego anyway. What do you think? And what does this all mean to me? One day I wanted to run and the origin of why this is lost to me. I was a kid athlete, soccer primarily, and there was a race in sixth grade, an 800 meter run at my school and I won it going away. I had competed in the citywide track meet prior to that, but this was different and I decided I had to run track in middle school. When I showed-up for the first day of track practice in seventh grade, I went out with the star runners for a five mile run and it was easy and comfortable – I kept up, it fed my ego, and after that I just ran all the time – formally and informally. It became an obsession, like reading had been prior to that, and everywhere I visited I thought, I can run here. I don’t know that I consciously understood what purpose it served, I just knew it felt good and necessary, and what happened over time is the obsession became a means for organizing the day, the week, plotting my life out – a form of self-care and mindfulness before I knew anything about such things. Then I started to write and as the two overlapped – competing for my time and space in my day – I started to understand that I could untangle the challenges I faced on the written page while running. As I got older I also came to understand how calming it had always been. Writing and running then are not interchangeable – though sometimes I have to choose one over the other, and writing wins now most of the time, but complimentary. So, why do my characters feel this way? For all the reasons I do – the possibility of escape, insight, and calm.
AK: Wow. I’m here for EVERYTHING you ever want to write about running and writing.
And to your question: Ah, loving one’s characters! Warts and all! I think it’s a crucial part of our job, otherwise we risk creating bland or inauthentic characters, boring chess pieces we move around the plot board without passion, consigning unfortunate readers to follow our dull strategies in dull confusion. This dullness is something you are incapable of, Mr. Tanzer. You’re clearly invested in your sparky characters.
So, speaking of characters, in particular Hannah and Gabriel; did you find it easier to write from one POV or the other? And relatedly, do you relate more to one or the other? I guess I’m asking, and you can ditch this part of the question if it’s too ‘personal’ (though you never seem to shy away from that stuff) in what ways do you see yourself in these two complicated creatures you’ve created?
BT: EVERYTHING?
No one wants or needs that many words, and I’m happy to supply them regardless.
I’m definitely invested in my characters, sparky and otherwise, though more than that, it’s akin to a love affair. Maybe there isn’t a difference, not for me anyway. I find all my characters worthy of my unconditional love, which I will note here, I recently learned from the results of an emotional intelligence assessment I took for a class I teach, I not only tend to believe most everyone is worthy of unconditional love, I believe I am too.
Which I share because it’s true, maybe funny, and I believe sets the stage for your larger question.
With Hannah and Gabriel I didn’t find it easier to write from one POV or the other. In a way they’re both parts of me spun through lenses that aren’t quite me. Of course with Hannah, while the fears and concerns, even some of the decisions are quite me, or could be if I was caught-up in the rhythms of this story, I wanted her to feel more female then I am – that sounds so weird, and so even as both characters and all my fictional characters channel a range of people in my life – and other people’s lives I know and steal from, I concentrated on thinking about my mom, my wife and certain friends of ours – mostly from the past, who remind me of them as I crafted the character. What’s funny is that my agent and publisher separately pointed out lines of dialogue they felt a woman wouldn’t say – they were sort of male gaze-y, and in both cases they weren’t things my wife or mother would say, but they were borrowed from female friends of ours who had and do say those kinds of things.
They felt real to me, and I appreciated those women when we were friendly with them. I also cut those lines. I don’t need anyone to get stuck.
To take another and deeper beat, when I write nonfiction I really try not to shy away from personal stuff because it feels dishonest – which isn’t to say I’d write about things that would expose things my children or wife, my mom, would not want exposed about them, but if it’s about me – my flaws, my damage, my poor decisions, and all the good fucked things too – the sex, drugs, fantasies, etc. I try not to flinch.
So, in full call-back mode, it’s important to note that these characters exist in the fantasy realm of my brain – what does it look like to do the things I don’t do, follow those impulses I don’t follow, show emotions publicly that I can more easily – and readily, share on the page? In that sense I relate to both characters. They’re damaged and gorgeous and self-aware enough to know how fucked-up things are – how fucked-up they are, but not able to better manage it. For the most part that’s not me, but those thoughts are always present and fascinating to think about.
Which makes me feel like I’m shying away from something when I’m not trying to.
Except, I’ve gotten fired from a big job, I’ve fought with my children, I’ve drank too much, I’ve been in therapy, I’ve had fingers amputated, I’ve engaged in suicidal ideation, I’ve said things I wished I didn’t even as I could feel the words forming on my tongue, I’ve lost a parent and other people I love, I’ve been assaulted, I’ve hurt people when I didn’t want to, longed for people who weren’t interested in me or off limits – especially in high school, I’ve been super fucking scared and sad, and shit seemed pointless, and yet little of that looks anything like this book – and most of these things are not in the book, and none of that is to sound boastful by the way – I hope, however, the feelings and emotions associated with these things are accessible and offer texture for what I’m trying to capture on the page.
So, what then do you call something that’s clearly of you in so many ways and yet wholly fictional in most every way that tells this story?
A novel I guess.
AK: Ha. A novel indeed, Ben. And yours is a beauty. Before we sign off here, one last question: What’s next for you, writing-wise? Anything new percolating in that magnificent, generous, authentic mind of yours?
BT: You’re very kind Alice Kaltman, and you had me at generous, possibly authentic, definitely magnificent, though you may have left out narcissistic? Anyway, and due at least in part to the long gestation period of this book’s release, I do have something percolating, and possibly on paper – a sort of sci-fi joint, “Wizard of Oz” meets “The Road,” though I also have a thing with an editor that I’m waiting for notes on as well. I don’t know if it’s a secret, not yet to be announced sort of thing, so I’ll say this, it’s nonfiction and may just explore the relationship between the movie After Hours, Kafka, grief, The Basketball Diaries, New York City, Patti Smith, and living an artistic life. Not that I can confirm or deny this.
Emmy-award winner Ben Tanzer‘s acclaimed work includes the short story collection UPSTATE, the science fiction novel Orphans and the essay collections Lost in Space and Be Cool. Ben is a storySouth and Pushcart nominee, a finalist for the Annual National Indie Excellence and Eric Hoffer Book Awards, a winner of the Devil’s Kitchen Literary Festival Nonfiction Prose Award and a Midwest Book Award. He also received an Honorable Mention at the Chicago Writers Association Book Awards for Traditional Non-Fiction and a Bronze Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. He’s written for Hemispheres, Punk Planet, Men’s Health, and The Arrow, AARP’s GenX newsletter. His novel The Missing will be released on March 21, 2024 by 7.13 Books. He lives in Chicago with his family.
Alice Kaltman is the author of two story collections and three novels. Upcoming are a graphic memoir, Alice’s Big Book of Mistakes, from Word West Press in September 2024, and Mother and Daughter Sit for a Portrait, a historical fiction novella, from WTAW Press in early 2025. Alice’s work has been nominated for Best American Short Stories, Best Small Fiction, and the Pushcart Prize. Alice splits her time between Brooklyn and Montauk, NY where she lives, surfs, and swims with her husband the sculptor Daniel Wiener and Ollie the Wonder Dog.