Award-winning author Margot Singer's memoir-in-essays, Secret Agent Man, is a powerful exploration of family history, memory, and the meaning of home. The daughter and granddaughter of European Jews displaced by the Holocaust, Singer probes the nature of time and history, obscurity and clarity, displacement and loss. The title essay probes her memories of her father—was he or was he not a spy?—as it grapples with the riddle of whether our parents ever are who we imagine them to be. The impact of these essays is cumulative; page by page, they build into a moving examination of the mysteries and betrayals of the body, desire, artistic ambition, identity, and place.
Secret Agent Man traces Singer's journey from her childhood in Boston, growing up with a father "who wasn't like anybody else's dad," to her days as a high-powered management consultant in New York City, to her mid-life relocation to a small college town in the heart of the Midwest. Compelling, questioning, and yearning, this collection combines a poet's engagement with language with the essayist's intimate, reflective voice.
Margot Singer is the author of a novel, Underground Fugue, and a linked short story collection, The Pale of Settlement. She is also the co-author, with Nicole Walker, of Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction. She is the recipient of the Flannery O'Connor Award, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, the Reform Judaism Prize, the Glasgow Prize, the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, as well as grants from the NEA and the Ohio Arts Council. A professor of creative writing at Denison University, she lives with her family in Granville, Ohio.
