Lost Children Archive

One of the primary themes that stretches across Lost Children Archive is the use of language, both to tell a story and to insinuate double meanings. As a documentarist who records and edits sound, the mother narrator is acutely aware of how her choices—which words to use, which details to describe, what order to arrange things in—shape the listener’s sensation of the story she’s telling. When the novel opens, she worries over the necessity of providing a satisfactory story for her children about her impending divorce and the split of their family:

I’m not sure which parts of our story we might each choose to place and edit out for them, and which ones we’ll shuffle around and insert back in to produce a final version […] we’ll need to give them a beginning, a middle, and an end. We’ll need to give them an answer, tell them a proper story (5).

For the narrator, the question of “editing out” certain unpleasant, difficult-to-digest details is always implicit in the process of telling a story.

As the children overhear radio stories of migrant children dying, being detained, or being deported, the question of “editing out” details of her marital strife (from the family story) gradually commingles with the question of “editing out” other people’s trauma.