Secret Agent Man: Essays

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.