Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir

Here Matis continues the story of her relationship with her husband, Justin, whom she first met while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail alone, escaping a past she explored in her first memoir, Girl in the Woods. Early in their marriage, Justin leaves the house one day and never returns. Matis delves into his past as she attempts to find her husband and learns a surprising truth. Matis shows a keen interest in place and describes each new location of her itinerant life with an eye for detail, though she is a bit heavy-handed with adjectives. Initially spiraling into drinking and petty theft, she details months of inertia as her funds disappear and book deadlines pass, until she returns to the home she left in that earlier account, arriving at her parents’ place, starved, broke, and needing care. It is the healing of her relationship with her parents and the letting go of Justin that allows Matis the clarity of mind to finish her memoir and begin her life anew.