All the Missing Girls(102)

11. What does the book seem to suggest about how well we can know others? What does the story indicate about the way we come to “know” another person? What influences our assessments of others and what prevents us from knowing other people—and ourselves—better?



12. What does Nicolette say is most necessary and essential to our survival? Do you agree with her? Why or why not?



13. At the conclusion of the story, what does Nicolette say defines home? Is her concept of what makes a home surprising? Do you agree with her definition? Explain.



14. Evaluate the theme of memory in the book. Are the memories of the characters reliable? Why or why not? What does this suggest about the way that time influences our perspective and how the past affects our future?



15. Since the majority of the action takes place in Nicolette’s memory, how does the author create suspense and tension? What are some of the most surprising elements of plot and character and why are they surprising? Were you surprised by the conclusion of the book? Why or why not? How did your opinion of each of the characters change by the story’s end?


Enhance Your Book Club 1. Read and evaluate All the Missing Girls alongside Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. What do these books have in common? How are the characters alike? Who narrates the stories in each, and what points of view are represented? Does one point of view stand out over the rest? What common experiences do the characters share? What overlapping themes appear in these works? What role does genre play in treating these themes?



2. Use All the Missing Girls as a starting place to discuss victimization and the portrayal of victims. Nicolette gives us a sense that there was a feeling in Cooley Ridge that Corinne may have “deserved” and “brought on” what happened to her. Discuss how reputation and gossip affect an investigation and shape how we perceive crimes and their victims.



3. Consider an event from the past that you feel shaped or heavily influenced the course of your life. How has your perspective of this event changed with the passage of time? What do you understand about the event now that you did not then?



4. Write a story about your adolescence. Then write the same story in reverse beginning with the conclusion and working back to the beginning. How does it change your perspective?


A Conversation with Megan Miranda Can you tell us about your inspiration for All the Missing Girls? What were the novel’s origins? Where and how did you begin, and why were you interested in telling this story?



When I first began writing All the Missing Girls, I called the draft Disappear, because thematically, that’s what I was really interested in exploring. The ways in which people can disappear—not just literally, but the other versions of themselves as they grow and change over time. I wanted to explore how things that happen in adolescence can change and define people. How we are equally shaped not just by how we see ourselves, but by how others see us. And I’m fascinated by memory—the pieces we hold on to, and why we hold on to them, and how those pieces can shift and change over time.



The heart of the story idea actually began with the backstory, where I first got a sense of who the characters were, and the mystery that haunts them. But when I sat down to write, the scene that first came to me was ten years later, with Nic returning home. So I knew I would be playing with two stories, that the theme and the story would both become integral to the structure, and that they all would need to develop alongside each other.



Why did you choose to write the story in reverse rather than in a linear fashion?



I knew I wanted to tell a story about a disappearance where the “reveal” of the mystery would not only be the narrator discovering what happened, but the reader experiencing it for themselves. And I wanted that structure to be there for a reason. So I thought a lot about why a narrator would choose to tell a story in reverse, which is how the idea finally came together for me: that Nic, who is recounting the story, is (as she says at one point) working her way up to something, back to something, giving pieces of both the past and the present as she does. And, for me, the structure was also linked to the fact that she’s going into a much deeper past to pull all the answers together, unearthing memories from ten years earlier that she’d rather leave alone.



When you began writing the story, had you already decided what the ending would be or did the story lead you to its own conclusion?



Partly. I had worked through a bit of the backstory first, so I knew where I was generally heading in the past storyline, about what happened ten years earlier. But the present story, with Annaleise’s disappearance, led to its own conclusion as I wrote, which then changed a bit of the past as well. The story evolved a lot as I wrote—I had a few pivotal scenes in mind, but other than that, I let the story and the characters lead the way.



How did you decide upon the narrator of the story?



For me, this was always Nic’s story—she came to me first, and the story filled in around her. I started to hear her voice clearly on the drive she describes in the opening section, on her way back home. While Nic grew up in North Carolina and moved north, I did a bit of the reverse: I grew up in New Jersey, and now live in North Carolina. And it’s a drive that I, like Nic, now know by heart. The route itself feels like a character shift as the scenery changes around you, how you can feel the person you are become the person you were as you go—with all the people who know you that way, waiting for you there.