I Found You

I Found You is part of a mystery subgenre that uses amnesia as its main plot device. Jewell often explores the trope of memory loss in her novels. For instance, her 2009 novel The Truth About Melody Brown is about how the titular character loses her memories of childhood. In highlighting the link between childhood trauma, identity, and memory loss, Jewell follows in the footsteps of authors such as Tana French, whose first Dublin Murder Squad novel, In the Woods, features a protagonist, Rob, suffering from memory loss. More specifically, Rob can’t remember a traumatic event, an unsolved mystery, from his childhood. Similarly, Frank/Graham can’t remember a traumatic event from his teenage years for most of his life. The comparison highlights how different individuals can respond to the same type of event differently. French features another amnesiac in her novel The Witch Elm. Its protagonist, Toby, loses his memory after an assault. His more wide-reaching memory loss can be compared to how Frank/Graham loses his memory after he commits a violent act, and it wipes out everything in his life, not just the trauma of losing his sister and father. The severity of memory loss following these events suggests that some events—one in which the person might be responsible for violence—can be more completely wiped from memory as a way for a person to subconsciously shield themselves from the truth.

Another trope in amnesia mysteries is an antagonist who plants false memories or beliefs in the protagonist. An example is the well-known mystery about memory loss The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins. In it, the protagonist, Rachel, is traumatized by her abusive husband; he makes her believe things that aren’t true, including that she is violent. This can be compared to Frank/Graham’s fears that he is a killer in I Found You, with the key difference that Frank constructs the killer narrative out of guilt, rather than being deceived by someone else. This aspect of the trope explores how guilt affects a character’s self-identity and how others can take advantage of a vulnerable individual for their own ends.