Kathleen Donohoe

Kathleen Donohoe's new novel is Ghosts of the Missing.

From her Q&A with Caroline Leavitt:

I always think something is haunting a writer into writing the books that they do, so I was wondering what was haunting you to write Ghosts of the Missing?

In 1979 six-year-old Etan Patz disappeared off a Manhattan street while walking to the school bus alone for the first time. He was two weeks older than me, and I’m from Brooklyn, NY. I knew what a city sidewalk looked like at eight o’clock in the morning. Even to a child, it was clear that whatever happened to Etan began quietly. He was seen by a mailman waiting to cross Wooster Street, in sight of the bus stop. Then never again. After thirty-eight years, a man was convicted of his murder, but Etan has never been found.

I’ve since read about hundreds of missing persons cases (The internet has made it easy.) Haunting, certainly, are thoughts of the families, suspended between grief and hope. There are the disappearances themselves, those with circumstances that defy logic, coupled with the awareness that they do not, in fact, defy logic. Every one, no matter how inexplicable, has an answer. Nobody actually vanishes into thin air.

But I think what haunted me into writing this book are what I call the last knowns. By this I mean the last definitive sighting. Or the last probable sighting, when it’s uncertain. Ghosts of the Missing is very much about this--the final moment when...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue