The Book of Lost Friends
The Book of Lost Friends
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
Quizzes
NEWReading Tools
Lisa Wingate on The Book of Lost Friends
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
An email from a stranger on a back porchThe project began not with Wingate’s own research but with a reader’s tip. While she was procrastinating on a different manuscript under contract, a note arrived from a volunteer at the Historic New Orleans Collection named Diane, who had spent months digitizing post-Civil War newspaper columns in which formerly enslaved people advertised for lost family members. Diane thought the history resembled something in ‘Before We Were Yours,’ Wingate’s novel about children stolen by a corrupt Memphis adoption ring, and said so. What Wingate found when she followed the link stopped her work on the other book entirely.
She’d just finished Before We Were Yours, and she thought there was another, similar piece of history I should know about — a story of children taken from their parents and disbursed into the world, of families torn apart, and the surprising means by which some of these families found their way back to one another decades later. As a volunteer with the Historic New Orleans Collection, Diane had been entering old newspaper advertisements into a database for genealogists and historical researchers. The ads ran in the decades following the Civil War in a column called ‘The Lost Friends,’ and were written by formerly enslaved people, now free, seeking news of their long-lost sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, grandmothers and grandfathers, husbands and wives.
Once inside the database, Wingate read for hours. What struck her was not only the grief in the ads but their fragility: the people who wrote them had almost certainly vanished from every other historical record.
I tumbled down a rabbit hole for hours, lost in the lives of these long-ago people. It was both strange and powerful to realize that their voices and quite probably their names had faded into history generations ago, and yet, in old filing cabinets and dusty university archives, these small bits of their stories had survived.
Wingate already had a commitment to another novel, and she intended to honor it first. But Diane kept forwarding individual ads as she digitized them, and one involving a woman named Caroline Flowers, whose family had been sold off one by one as a plantation nephew fled, made the choice for her.
I knew that very day, as I took in dozens of the Lost Friends ads, meeting family after family, searcher after searcher, that I had to write the story of a family torn apart by greed, chaos, cruelty, despairing of ever again seeing one another. I knew that the Lost Friends ads would provide hope where hope had long ago been surrendered.
How she wrote it
Hundreds of narratives and one invented adWriting Hannie, an enslaved woman making her way through Reconstruction Louisiana, required Wingate to step inside an experience she had not lived. Rather than drawing on secondary scholarship, she went to accounts written by people who had been there: WPA slave narratives recorded during the Depression, books composed during the era itself. She read hundreds of them before she wrote a sentence of Hannie’s voice.
I delved into historical narratives — in this case, the authentic voices of people who had survived slavery and the tumult of Reconstruction, and related their experiences firsthand. Books written during the time period and the WPA slave narratives, recorded during the Depression, opened intensely personal windows into the lives that might have been lived by the writers of the Lost Friends advertisements. I poured over hundreds of them, seeking the voices of lived experience — the everyday thoughts, emotions, and endless work that would have filled Hannie’s years before emancipation, and what her life would have been like afterward, as the plantation economy turned to sharecropping and tenant farming, which more often than not amounted to economic bondage. Everything in Hannie’s story came from historical narratives of the time period.
A practical question drove the choice of 1987 for the novel’s present-day storyline, in which a young teacher named Benny discovers the Lost Friends ads and uses them with her students. Wingate wanted the modern timeline anchored close enough to slavery’s aftermath that living memory could still reach it.
[paraphrased from audio] Wingate chose 1987 specifically because, she said, she wanted ‘to get back closer to a time when you would have people still around who had direct experience with the descendants of slavery.’
Of the Lost Friends ads that appear in the novel, almost every one is reproduced verbatim from the real database Diane helped build. Only a single ad is fictional: the one that generates Hannie’s entire backstory. Wingate modeled it on a real advertisement placed by a woman named Caroline Flowers.
[paraphrased from audio] Wingate explained that Hannie’s Lost Friends ad is based on a real ad placed by a woman named Caroline Flowers, and that it is ‘the only one in the book that is fictional. The rest of the Lost Friends ads in the book are real ads, the real stories of real families.’
The classroom scenes in Benny’s storyline drew on a different kind of primary source: dinner-table stories from Wingate’s own family. Her mother, who was a teacher, served as her first reader throughout her career and flagged anything that rang false about school life.
Several teachers in my family and the family I married into tell tales around the dinner table and campfire. The stories in the book are some blend of those, and my own experience as a student. Mom has been my first reader during my career, and she is sure to tell me if something doesn’t seem realistic in a school scene.
What she wants us to sit with
Voices that survived nowhere elseThe Lost Friends ads preserve something that almost no other archive from this period does: the words of formerly enslaved people speaking for themselves, in their own names, about their own families. Wingate describes reading them as an experience that resists summarizing because each ad belongs to one specific person.
Names that survived perhaps nowhere beyond these desperate pleas of formerly enslaved people, once written in makeshift classrooms, at kitchen tables, and in church halls . . . then sent forth on steam trains and mail wagons, on riverboats and in the saddlebags of rural mail carriers, destined for the remote outposts of a growing country. Far and wide, the missives journeyed, carried on wings of hope after being printed in a Methodist newspaper that was read from pulpits all over the country. Former slaves were seeking their family members and some were actually reunited.
Wingate has described watching real survivors of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, the corrupt adoption ring at the center of ‘Before We Were Yours,’ finally learn their biological family histories in their seventies and eighties. That experience informed what she wanted Benny’s classroom project to mean: that recovering a lost family history is not a luxury or a curiosity but a need that does not expire.
Every time I drop into the Lost Friends database online and read the ads, I’m struck by the uniqueness of each family’s story, their heartbreak, their love, and the extraordinary lengths they went through to find one another again. These life experiences have not only been preserved through the Lost Friends letters, but are available via the Internet to anyone from genealogists to teachers, to researchers and historians, to those who simply seek to learn true history from the people who lived it.
The database Diane helped build is real and publicly searchable. Wingate’s hope, stated plainly across multiple interviews, is that readers who finish the novel will go look at it.