Award-winning author Margot Singer’s collection of linked 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, nostalgia 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, Margot Singer
$20.00
ISBN: 9781962131070
Binding: Paperback
Published: April 15, 2025
What we’re offered in Secret Agent Man is a singular mind at work, nimbly and deftly traversing history, archaeology, geography, photography, psychoanalysis, literature, personal narrative, and indeed personal mythology. Witnessing Margot Singer make these intricate connections is exhilarating, and even more so because her writing is so grounded—in the body, in place, in a human life fully lived. I read this book slowly, because I kept rereading whole paragraphs for their pleasures: image, metaphor, music. —Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Beautiful
Margot Singer’s essay collection, Secret Agent Man, has much to offer us regarding the human desire for permanence and all that threatens it. I admire the way her mind moves as well as her gorgeous writing. This is a collection that leaves a lasting impression. —Lee Martin, author of the Pulitzer Prize Finalist, The Bright Forever
An extremely poised and accomplished work of essayistic art in which Margot Singer explores a series of interconnected themes (privacy, security, dependence, independence, the presentation of self in everyday life) to arrive at a shattering insight that we already ‘know’’ but are afraid to acknowledge: we are all our own (best and worst) secret agents.”—David Shields, author of Reality Hunger
Secret Agent Man is simply brilliant! Margot Singer intricately weaves personal experience with fascinating research to explore nuances of family, self, and home. This collection becomes, as she puts it when describing a house, “…a container of memory, a receptacle of time. —Brenda Miller, author of A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form
Spies dress in black and carry attaché cases. They may
disguise themselves as diplomats, business executives, exotic
dancers, academics, scientists, consultants, epileptics, holy men.
Spies possess their own geometry. They have dimension,
volume, angles, planes: a surface and an underneath.
Spies listen through keyholes. They squint through
one eye.
Spies collect passports, languages, bugs, maps, lovers,
offshore bank accounts, gadgets, covers, ciphers, names.
A spy is a trick of perspective. If a spy turns sideways,
he may disappear.
Spies used to send dispatches from clandestine thirty-
two-pound radio transmitters, but not anymore.
Spies may be sleepers, dangles, walk-ins, plants, special
agents, station chiefs, or moles. They may be single or double.
They may be blown or burned.
Spies never go to AA meetings. Spies don’t talk about
the past.
Spies disappear into the background. They wear button-
up shirts and reading glasses, just like all your father’s friends.
You can poke your finger through a spy. He will scatter
like ash.
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.
