At the heart of Megan Milks’s Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body is the melodrama of adolescence. A genre-bending coming-of-age novel, the book blends choose-your-own-adventure stories, detective fiction, and wacky, surrealist body horror. It follows Margaret Worm—girl sleuth extraordinaire and the leader of mystery club Girls Can Solve Anything (GCSA)—as she juggles anxieties about fitting in at school, the widening distance between her and her friends, as well as her incredulity at the fact that they now seem more worried about “develop[ing] crushes on unworthy young men” than what are clearly “the more important things to do”: solving crimes, saving people, and getting to the bottom of events unusual and strange. After all, if GCSA doesn’t rise to the occasion, who else is there to track down the fates of missing toddlers, lost pets, and stolen, endangered butterflies?
Being a teenager is not all puppy love and pool parties. The polymorphous density of the book’s narrative structure reflects how every minor change feels monumental, when the stakes are sky-high and allow for no compromise, when we are hypersensitive to every stimulus, constantly burning with a need to do something, to do more, without necessarily knowing what it is that we need so badly to do. Tossing the bildungsroman’s traditionally linear narrative out the window, events in The Missing Body unfurl erratically, freely switching between perspectives, time, and space—like a picky, moody, greedy teenage girl that can’t quite make up her mind. The book moves through first-person accounts from a middle-schooled Margaret, who takes up the roles of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in tandem and relays all the “cases” that she and the rest of GCSA have solved, to choose-your-own-adventure gameplay with Margaret as its main character (now high-school age and in a treatment center for an eating disorder). The Missing Body is also interspersed with free indirect discourse about her struggles to navigate high school as well as letters that she writes to her friends and family while in the hospital. The novel itself is caught in the flux of puberty, as its narrative registers cavort with unpredictable caprice. We never know what is awaiting us on the next page, just as we rarely expect the growth spurts that hit us one summer.
Yet the story always revolves around one constant: its titular heroine, Margaret, with her unquenchable thirst for answers and her fixation on rules, logic, evidence. In her years as a seasoned sleuth, Margaret’s most trusted dictum is that “People are not who they seem,” which, throughout the novel, becomes a refrain. In the span of the book’s two-hundred-and-fifty-nine pages, Margaret fights off her schoolteacher Mrs. Stillwater, whose frumpy appearance harbors manic fantasies of fusing butterfly DNA with her own to become the perfect specimen; she takes a “pink, wet brain that was drooling all over the green carpet” as a client that, as it turns out, willingly sloughed off its body to collect insurance money; and, at the treatment center, she chases after a ghost, Nell, whose body “spills up and out and melts” into a portal that leads down to a cacophony of mouths, tongues, and teeth. Perhaps a more accurate spin on Margaret’s motto, then, is that bodies are not what they first seem. Like the fleshly opening that Nell morphs into, The Missing Body has no shortage of blood, guts, and goo. Quite to the contrary, it “disassemble[s] and reconfigure[s]” bodies like “a mad scientist,” avidly experimenting with every possible permutation. Here, humans become butterflies, brains ditch bodies, mouths multiply and morph into mazes. The body can be grotesque, beautiful, awkward, or emaciated, but it is never stable—rather, it is always on the brink of change.
We might call this vision of the body fantastical, surrealist, or even queer; we might also call it adolescent. It is telling how the novel begins,
Adolescence: We all go through it, some of us again and again. It’s a transitional space, a waiting room, this long, shapeless stretch between youth and adulthood, naivete and knowledge. It’s the private heat within which our goop becomes what it wants to become. It’s the mystery of the banana, the magic converting its peel from pale green to a brash and confident yellow. It’s the burrow of dirt into which the earthworm worms to improve itself in secret. It’s the passage from this into that, from here to there, to some kind of passing maturity. Adolescence is the hallway. The between, the almost, the not-there-yet.
Invoking José Esteban Muñoz’s declaration that “Queerness is not yet here,”[1] Milks suggests that, in the end, adolescence is a fundamentally queer time, when things are more likely to go haywire than not. In a way, to be queer isn’t too different from being an eternal teenager, constantly working through self-discovery, testing out what we desire, learning to be inside our own bodies, coming out—first to ourselves, then to those that love us—and then mopishly starting it all over again when we realize that we didn’t get it quite right the first time around.
To that end, it makes sense that, compared to the Cronenbergian horrors that she encounters almost daily, what frustrates Margaret the most are her friends’ boy-craziness and her own “butterflies” that “flutter furiously” whenever her pretty schoolmate, Gretchen, is around. (At one point, Margaret confesses helplessly: “I found that, more than anything else, I wanted Gretchen McGann to like me. Like, really like me.”) Like an episode of Buffy or Teen Wolf, The Missing Body is overrun with vampires, witches, phantoms, and monsters, but it is, above all, anchored to the infuriating ineffability of desire, especially when inflected through teen angst. Margaret might not bat an eye at a monstrous human-butterfly hybrid that reeks of “decaying lettuce,” but when Gretchen asks her to go to the dance with her—not exactly as friends, but with the answer to the unspoken “then what” left hanging—she is rendered speechless. “Weird and uncomfortable,” to use Gretchen’s words; or to use Margaret’s own, “just confused.” Where the typical bildungsroman follows the journey of a youth as they learn what it means to mature and enter into society, The Missing Body is all about how lessons learned might not be useful at all. “People are not who they seem”—then who is Margaret Worm, really?
Margaret’s confusion intensifies in the second half of the novel, which takes place at the treatment center and formally plays more extensively with choose-your-own-adventure narratives. According to its nurses, the center operates on trust: “They trusted you to make good choices, which meant they presented the good choices to you and it was your choice whether to choose them.” Yet, as Margaret quickly learns from her roommate Carrie—a problem child who has been in and out of the hospital for years and stubbornly refuses any attempt at helping her recover—rules set in place for discipline can also be a kind of game. You don’t have to make good choices; you just need to look like you are. In lieu of chapters, here the text is divided into “levels”: if you play your cards right, you get to level up. The first challenge Margaret faces goes down like this,
Carrie takes large, showy bites of her veggie wrap. You work through your burger with diligence and impatience, until Carrie catches your eye.
You
— ignore her. If it means following the rules, you are that kind of girl. Rules get made for good reasons.
— grab your throat subtly. Pretend you are choking subtly. Don’t oversell it. Be believable.
You gag quietly, swallow your breath. Nurse Hannah jerks to attention, prepared to administer the Heimlich though you can tell she would rather not move. You cough and hack and nearly barf up your food, pretense teetering into reality. Gasping, you lean back.
In contrast to most choose-your-own-adventure stories, where the reader explores the various outcomes of the text by jumping back and forth between pages (“If you choose A, go to page X; If you choose B, go to page Y”), here, the formal presentation of a “choice” is a feint: ignoring Carrie was never an option. The narrative moves on peremptorily, and before we know it, we, along with Margaret, are gagging, covering for Carrie as she sneaks a cookie up her sleeve. The level concludes: “Later Carrie will show off the cookie she yanked from her tray. She’ll give you a high five and an approving grin. You have passed this level.”
Margaret’s inpatient stay, then, is not simply about coming to terms with her own body and how it reacts to the thought of food and calories. It is also about how she reacts to the physical proximity of another—how she reacts to Carrie, someone that, like Gretchen, brings back those unsettlingly familiar butterflies in her stomach, except this time it is “stronger and more cruel, sharper, a panic.” For Carrie, “leveling up” means hiding stones in pockets and subtly discarding meals to fool the nurses about her progress, but for Margaret, it is about getting Carrie’s attention, even if it means becoming an accomplice to her roommate’s misdemeanors and disregarding the rules—rules that make her “th[e] kind of girl” that she is. We might be tempted to question whether risking her own recovery is worth the simple smile she is rewarded with, but, for Margaret, it absolutely is. In fact—she never had a choice to begin with. To that end, the term “choose-your-own-adventure” is itself a misnomer: the choices that we as readers are given are always already constrained by the narrative world. The “choice” is hardly our “own.” In The Missing Body, however, Milks calls the genre on its bluff by making apparent exactly what it is that motivates Margaret on her adventures—not the possibility of getting healthier, not the goodwill of the nurses, not even her friends and family back home, but her love for Carrie. Desire, like an addiction or a disorder, is compulsory; it drives Margaret to do what she knows is “bad”—rules be damned. As the cliché goes, girls will do anything for love.
If adolescence is “the private heat within which our goop becomes what it wants to become,” before we finally settle on a shape that feels right, we often bend over backwards, contorting the goop of our bodies in all kinds of bizarre ways to try and fit into one mold after another, no matter how painful—molds such as thinness, heterosexuality, girlhood, or delinquency. But Milks also seems to suggest that, once our goop becomes what it wants to be, part of this pain subsides. Strikingly different in tone from the rest of the book, the final section of The Missing Body is the only part where we hear Margaret speak as an adult, in a letter she writes to Carrie years after their time together at the treatment center, her voice seamlessly blending with author Milks’s own. (The letter is signed “M”—for Margaret, as for Megan.) In this final epistle, gone is the vitriol that fueled teenage Margaret’s letters to her friends and family (“Dear Mom and Dad, Here goes. You suck, you’re fat, and I hate you,” one of them begins), and instead we see M leisurely, evenhandedly talk through the friendships, communities, and writing—from Muñoz to Kathy Acker to Kai Cheng Thom, whose line “Picking locks is a glorious thing” serves as the novel’s epigraph—that have since subdued the frenetic intensity of their once-overwhelming unhappiness.
There is a disarming frankness, too, that spills across the page. Pitched between the confessional and the autofictional, M looks back at their teenage angst with bittersweet fondness, but they are careful to avoid either romanticizing or trivializing its significance. They instead take it for what it is: the hallway through which they had to pass to get to the other side. As they reflect,
Which is more mortifying: Taking one’s own adolescent eating disorder seriously, or meditating with solemnity about the internal and external obstacles to Being/Becoming Queer and/or Trans? Maybe neither. More mortifying still may be writing with deep sincerity about the friendships that have taught one how to love. Maybe sappiness exists for a reason—for those situations where aesthetics are superfluous, where irony has no hold.
As the flurry of experiments with genre and form recedes, what rises to the surface is a “deep sincerity” that is as surprising as it is moving. Addressing us directly, M lays bare their every vulnerability despite their own mortification, and it is impossible to not hang onto their every word. The letter overflows with desire, shame, love, and humiliation—a feeling no doubt familiar to anybody who has struggled to push past the obstacles of queerness and/or transness—yet each emotion also seems more visceral as M writes to us from the other side of the hallway of adolescence. It is as if they are reaching for our hand and giving it a gentle squeeze, teaching us how to love but also, more significantly, reassuring us that it is possible, although it may never feel any easier.
“Transmasculinity hasn’t solved everything,” M goes on to write, “But it has made me a better friend.” While M never goes so far as to promise that “everything will be okay in the end,” they do seem to offer us the hope that “everything will start to make more sense, just give it time.” When all other aesthetic modes are merely superfluous, acts of self-renarration—like the book that is Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body, no matter how mortifyingly sappy in their self-seriousness and sincerity—allow us to mine from them the bare bones of queer intimacy and a sense of belonging. At the same time that the pains of adolescence abate with age, the messy confusion of mysteries that once eluded even a detective as shrewd as Margaret Worm will too slowly morph into something that begins to resemble clarity and contentment. This might sound rather sappy—and it is—but, as M tells us, maybe sappiness exists for a reason.
[1] José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2009), 1.