Lynn Slaughter

Photo by Matt Hoffman on Unsplash

My young adult novel, MISSING MOM, comes out in January of next year, and pre-orders will be available this coming fall. I’m getting excited!

Here’s a brief description:

Devastated by her mom’s sudden disappearance and the evidence pointing to suicide, seventeen-year-old Noelle, an aspiring ballet dancer, doesn’t believe her mom would ever have taken her own life. She undertakes her own investigation to find out what really happened to her mother.

Meantime, Noelle is dealing with growing romantic feelings for Ravi, her best friend and fellow dancer. And she’s worried about her little sister Whitney, who won’t talk about why she doesn’t want to visit their dad.

Threaded throughout the novel is also the story of Savannah, a young woman whose escape from an abusive marriage nearly two decades ago turns out to be connected to Noelle’s investigation.

This past week, I worked on a lengthy questionnaire from my publicist about the book in preparation for its launch. One of the questions that really made me think was: “Why is this book/story so important to you personally?”

I actually came up with several reasons, one of which I’ll talk about today, the trauma of loss, and others which I’ll be discussing in coming posts.

In many ways, MISSING MOM is a book about loss, and Noelle’s loss of her mother is something I really empathize with. The students I’ve worked with over the years who’ve lost a parent, whether through death, imprisonment, or abandonment, have been absolutely devastated.

In my own life, I didn’t so much lose my biological mother as I never really had her as an active presence in my life. From the time I was a few months old, my mom was institutionalized for mental illness. After ten years, she more or less recovered, got out of the mental hospital, and was divorced by my father. Although I periodically saw her, it was more like visiting a distant relative I barely knew and had little in common with. She was a rabid Christian Scientist, and the singular lens through which she viewed the world felt strange and uncomfortable for me.

So, when I was twelve and my father married his longtime executive assistant whom I adored, I was beyond thrilled! Suddenly, I had this lovely stepmom who listened and cared and greeted me with freshly baked cookies after school each day. I was in heaven and would have been devastated to lose her during my teenage years, much as Noelle is to lose her mom. In fact, when my stepmother’s marriage to my father went through a rough patch and he talked about divorcing her, there was no question whom I planned to live with, and it wasn’t my father.  Had my stepmom disappeared, I have no doubt that I would have done anything I could to find her, just as Noelle does.

Of course, moms don’t live forever, and in 2019, I lost mine. I still miss her, just as Noelle misses her mother terribly and faces moving forward in her life without the mom she adored.