Such examples create a rupture in our understanding of what it means to be missing: is a person still missing if no one is looking for them, if they go missing more than once (a third of all missing person cases are repeat incidents), if they want to remain gone? In each section, Garcia attends to a different aspect of the missing through extensive interviews: those who seek them (charities, missing persons units, the police), the “returned missing”, those whose lives have been destabilised in the wake of missing loved ones. Garcia’s first journalistic encounter with them was for a 2019 piece in Vice magazine examining the increase in numbers of reported missing persons. For Garcia, too, each story of a missing person is liable to evoke thoughts of his own father. For, even when a missing person returns, some aspects of their disappearance will always remain unknown.

Source: The Guardian May 15, 2021 06:22 UTC