3.0
Nobody Is Ever Missing
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesNobody Is Ever Missing Reviews
3.0
“This book was quite hard to get through. Many of the sentences are well over 200 words, which made the book so unbelievably dense, and I truly felt like I was losing my mind along with the main character. When I could keep my head on straight and understand what was going on it was an interesting book! Elly herself was an intriguing MC. Her inner dialog, though wordy, was fascinating. I really enjoyed how she thought and talked about her husband, you could just feel something was off there from the beginning.”
“When you’ve convinced yourself that you’re stuck inside your own life, you can run away from everything until you have nothing left. That is, everything except yourself.
Much like the plot of this story, the pacing evoked a narrative hitch-hiking, engaging with passersby for brief but impactful stretches of road. The concept that kept coming up for me was <i>sonder</i> — the notion that every single individual you see is living as vivid and complex a life as yours, despite them being adjunct to your story. What do you do with this connection to humanity when you feel you’ve lost your own? Where in the strangeness do you find the familiarity of yourself?
I paired this book with <i>Stay and Fight</i> for my 2026 pairings, given their shared themes of finding one’s way back to oneself in unconventional and primal ways. When thinking about the two together, I think about what it means to want for yourself, not to please others or to follow a more given lifelong compliance to the social contract. Both stories act as quiet rebellions against expectation, building momentum towards a radical honesty that can sound like a feral howl in the wind, audible only to those with ears to listen.
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“I looked back at him like I didn't have any trouble to tell because that's my trouble, I thought, not knowing how to tell it, and this is why my favorite thing about airport security is how you can cry the whole way through and they'll only try to figure out whether you'll blow up.”
“and though I knew I had the potential to do this locked in me like a poisonous pet snake, I knew I didn't have the part of a person you must have to turn that potential kinetic, to be the kind of person who can let their awful plow.”
“I rolled to face the wall because I did not care for the here or the now and I wondered whether we were who we thought we were, if we were actually married or just in a continuous situation with each other and I wondered if my want to get up and leave him was an indigenous want, something I had birthed, or whether this want was foreign, a splinter, something to pry out.”
“I knew it was possible that I was not in love with a person but a person-shaped hole.”
“Some people make us feel more human and some people make us feel less human and this is a fact as much as gravity is a fact and maybe there are ways to prove it, but the proof of it matters less than the existence of it—how a stranger can show up and look at you and make you make more sense to yourself and the world, even if that sense is extremely fragile and only comes around occasionally and is prone to wander or fade—what matters is that sometimes sense is made between two people and I don't know if it's random or there is any kind of order to it, what combinations of people work the best and why and how do we find these people and how do we keep these people around, and I don't know if it's chaos or not chaos but it feels like chaos to me so I suppose it is.”
“I remembered what someone said once about travel-ing, that sometimes the body moves somewhere too quickly for the soul and the soul is taking its sweet-ass time to catch up because the soul is not on speaking terms with the body but regardless, the body is a lonely animal without the soul, so I thought, maybe it is time for me to sit very still and wait for the soul and I understood how melodramatic that was but I decided not to care because, after all, someone else had said it first and even though I couldn't remember exactly who it seemed that they were very old or European or both—someone somehow trustworthy.”
“And it's still unclear to me why a person has abilities that they do not want to have, why a person feels things that person doesn't want to feel and why that person doesn't feel things that person does want to feel, and why a person falls out of love when being in love was such a good thing to be in, and why a person makes loud and clumsy attempts at midnight to kill the life one could reasonably expect that person to want to preserve.”
“I didn't leave you to become someone else's something, someone else's twin to talk to, someone else's clone to mirror, someone else's anything. It was not that kind of leaving. I am not that kind of gone. I am gone but not so gone that there is no possibility of me coming back, though maybe I have gone out far enough now that you are preparing for a future without this particular wife—so, Husband, if this is so, please keep in mind you are still legally obligated to me, written like a law into my life, and we cannot remove ourselves from each other so easily, with such impulse, or, at least, this is somewhat true.“
“I knew right then there was little to nothing left between us and what had been keeping us together for so long was the rich and wild memory of how there had been so much, those past moments so nice we'd asked them to stay and now they'd all left, because moments never stay, whether or not you ask them, they do not care, no moment cares, and the ones you wish could stretch out like a hammock for you to lie in, well, those moments leave the quickest and take everything good with them, little burglars, those moments, those hours, those days you loved the most.”
“And where would all the me that he had housed in himself go if I wasn't there to be with him and see what he kept of me in him, and did the versions of each of us that we had crafted so exactly and precisely for the other person, did those versions just evaporate, just die, just disappear, just fall out of a building somewhere in each of our brains and if they did then why didn't we get to have funerals for them? I loved the he that he was to me. I loved him and he is dead and I want a black moment for that man. Give me a black moment for that.”
“No one is anything more than a slow event and I knew I was not a woman but a series of movements, not a life, but a shake, and this put a knot in my throat and a pause in my breathing and it turned my stomach, to know that my stomach was not a stomach but a turn and my breath was nothing if it did not move and my throat without my voice was just some slowly decaying meat but I had nothing to say anymore, not yet, and BELINDA refilled my coffee and the surface rolled and rippled and then it almost stilled but not quite because it shook as it will always shake and I watched it keep shaking.””
About Catherine Lacey
is the author of the novels
,
, and
, and the short story collection
. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She was a finalist, twice, for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, along with the Dylan Thomas Prize and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was named one of
s Best of Young American Novelists. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in
, and elsewhere. Born in Mississippi, she is based in Chicago.
Other books by Catherine Lacey
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