The Day That Went Missing

The Day That Went Missing: A Family's Story

Author	Richard Beard
Language	English
Publisher	Harvill Secker
Publication date	April 6, 2017
Media type	Hardcover
Pages	288
ISBN	978-1-910701-56-0
OCLC	1028521670
Dewey Decimal	155.937/092
LC Class	BF575.G7 B4127 2017

The Day That Went Missing: A Family's Story is a memoir written by English novelist Richard Beard. It was published in the United Kingdom in April 2017 by Harvill Secker, and in the United States in November 2018 by Little, Brown and Company.

Synopsis

The book begins with the author at age eleven in 1978, swimming in the sea off Cornwall, England with his nine-year-old brother, Nicky. Out of sight of their parents and siblings, they suddenly find themselves dragged into an undertow and are quickly out of their depth. Richard realizes that he is about to die and struggles frantically to shore, leaving Nicky behind. His last view of his brother is of the younger boy straining to keep his head above water and whimpering. Although Richard runs for help, it is too late by the time rescuers arrive. Nicky has drowned.

Nearly forty years later, Richard is haunted by his own inability to feel things deeply. He decides to perform an 'inquest' into his brother's death, believing that is the time and place where he began repressing his emotions. He interviews his mother and two surviving brothers, as well as one of the men who crewed the lifeboat that pulled Nicky's body from the sea. He visits his brother's grave for the first time and locates the beach where it happened, forcing himself to revisit the scene.

He is shocked to learn from his mother that after his parents returned from Nicky's funeral (which he and his brothers were not permitted to attend), the family went straight back to the vacation house they had been renting in Cornwall and resumed their holiday without speaking of what had happened. He and his older brother were sent back to boarding school only a few weeks later, and there again, no one spoke of Nicky, who had also been a student at the school. He interviews the school's headmaster, who tells him that he repeatedly woke screaming at night during his first months back.

Beard's father never spoke of Nicky to anyone again, and his mother said her dead son's name only occasionally over the years. Real memories of Nicky have been lost; his own mother remembers him as a poor student who was hopeless at sports, but Richard uncovers his school reports and learns that Nicky had in fact been a star pupil and athlete.

When he finds a notebook in which Nicky had written judgments of each of his three brothers, he is forced to confront the fact that he hadn't really liked the younger brother he feared was catching up to him and threatening his place in the family. Along the way, he reveals his anger at his father, who died in 2011 but had cancer that summer in 1978 and had not been expected to survive. He is angry with the older man for having sent each of his sons away to live at boarding school - where they had to shut down their emotions to succeed and avoid ridicule - at the age of eight, for being the prime agent of repression who kept the family from speaking about Nicky, and above all, for not jumping into the water and trying to save his son that day in Cornwall, when he had so little to lose.

Awards and honors

In the UK, the book was awarded the 2018 PEN Ackerley Prize for a literary biography of excellence. It was also shortlisted for both the 2017 Rathbones Folio Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize

The US edition was named a finalist in the autobiography category for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Critical reception

The Day That Went Missing received positive reviews from critics for both the 2017 UK and 2018 US releases.

Andrew Holgate, writing in the Sunday Times, called it "a memoir of real truth and heartbreaking emotional heft.” Novelist Nicholas Shakespeare reviewed it for The Spectator and described it as “A monument to the power of literature...a wonderful memoir but also a salvage operation in which he writes himself back into life." The Scotsman literary critic Stuart Kelly said it was "a book of consistent astonishments...Beard is one of our most accomplished authors."

The reviews for the 2018 U.S. release were similarly positive: Laurie Hertzel wrote in the Minneapolis Star Tribune: "Beard’s book has all the required elements of a great memoir — a compelling story, deep introspection, fine writing and an unflinching quest for factual and emotional truth. This haunting book is a profoundly moving study of memory, denial and grief." Publishers Weekly described it as "stunning...His beautifully written story is heartbreaking and unforgettable." And Kirkus Reviews said of it: "Meticulously crafted and searingly honest, Beard’s narrative is at once a story about the long and difficult road to self-forgiveness and a commentary on the wages of British emotional repression."