Where Do Missing Socks Go? (Paperback)

Paperback. Everybody has a theory about where missing socks go. Nobody asks why it bothers us so much. The machine ate it. It's behind the dryer. It's the children. It's under the bed, where it has been all along, being extremely findable by anyone willing to kneel.But nobody actually mourns a sock. A sock costs almost nothing. What stings is the survivor - perfectly intact, completely useless, kept in a drawer for years because throwing it away would mean admitting the other one isn't coming back.In twenty-four chapters that begin in the laundry and end somewhere you were not warned about, Mimi Masala follows the missing sock into the duvet cover, behind the washing machine, over the garden wall and into the rubber seal around the door. There she finds retrenchment and grief, belonging and hope, class and faith and regret, and the quiet cost of a life that appears to be working perfectly.Along the way: why you have never made a decision about the sock with the hole, only forty small ones. What the person who does your laundry knows about you, and what you know about them. Why the endings without a villain are the hardest ones to explain. How to tell outgrowing something from simply being restless. And why the cheerful tune your washing machine plays at the end of every cycle turns out to be a poem written by a political prisoner, about a fish that was only caught once somebody muddied the water.Funny on one page and quietly devastating on the next, Where Do Missing Socks Go? is written from Johannesburg for anyone who has ever stood in a laundry holding one sock and felt something larger than the situation deserved.You will never walk past a pair of socks the same way again. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…