Silence is not the answer.
My heart is still breaking a little bit just thinking of this story.
The novel follows young Michael, a “lost” boy in 1983’s New York City who is happy to let his eccentric best friend James take center stage in life, dance away his troubles at his favourite club The Echo, and above all, scared to come out to his parents after they kicked out his older brother Connor for doing so a while back. Together with his best friends James and Becky, Michael wades his way through life, just waiting to find himself and be able to be that self out loud – without consequences.
The backdrop to this magical story is a city caught up in the beginning stages of the looming threat that AIDS is spreading – fast. Caught up in his own funk over his sexuality, Michael becomes ever more worried – how big of a threat is AIDS, really? Should he be scared? Should this fear detain him from falling in love? And how is he ever supposed to allow himself to fall in love if that love might end up killing him?
Helene Dunbar manages to create a raw, tense atmosphere that mirrors the era of her novel perfectly. Throughout the story, you feel the longing, the agony, the fear that LGBTQ+ people had to (and still) live with. Random gay bashings, the slurred homophobic comment, the quick glance you throw over your shoulder before holding your lover’s hand in public – all this paired with the constant fear of contracting something that might leave you abandoned by all your peers and family in fear of catching an illness no one really knows how to treat or vanquish entirely.
I confess, this book isn’t an easy one to read. For one, the story takes a while to gain momentum and when it does, it still is hard to stay engaged, though I credit that more to the tough issue than the writing. It’s difficult to keep on hoping that Michael will get everything that he wants when you want to also throttle his homophobic father and passive mother, his friend who won’t tell him the truth about the sudden disappearance of an old roommate, or Michael’s brother who’s just living life from one guy to another, not caring about the possibility of getting…
And there it is.
The moment of enlightenment.
It’s a certain type of magic that Helene Dunbar managed with this story because it draws the reader in and then makes them question all their prior knowledge about sexuality, family values, responsibility and history. Because as I read, I understood that this was – this is the reality for so many LGBTQ+ people. We are in the closet and we are scared to come out – not because we don’t want to be ourselves but because we are held back by fathers who might throw us out of the only homes we’ve ever known, mothers who are too scared to defend their children against their husbands they’ve come to love before we were even born, by people who might judge us for being sexually active or wanting to explore what it means to love and be loved, to dress the way we want to, to take part in theatrical plays debating the silence that is at once oppressive and yet still a safety blanket. Because coming out is about so much more than just uttering one sentence.
As we follow Michael falling in love and questioning what it means to be himself, what it means to live his truth and what he is willing to sacrifice for it, we learn that everyone has their own journey, their own obstacles to face in the fight for love.
We Are Lost and Found serves as a reminder that living a lie only to please other people was and is still a thing that’s happening when it really shouldn’t be. It’s a reminder that even though we have come a long way from the 80s, even though we are just entering an era in which the LGBTQ+ community can be who they are more openly, that we should not forget our roots, should not forget that this has been a long time coming, and that we have yet so much more to go until we are “found”. A hauntingly beautiful, yet scarring story that captures the struggles of figuring out who you are while facing the uncertainties of the world, a story that should be mandatory reading for all.
We Are Lost and Found is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers as of September 3rd 2019.
Will you be reading We Are Lost and Found? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
A poignant, heartbreaking, and uplifting story in the tradition of The Perks of Being a Wallflower about three friends coming of age in the early 1980s as they struggle to forge their own paths in the face of fear of the unknown.
Michael is content to live in the shadow of his best friends, James, an enigmatic teen performance artist who everyone wants and no one can have and Becky, who calls things as she sees them, while doing all she can to protect those she loves. His brother, Connor, has already been kicked out of the house for being gay and laying low seems to be his only chance to avoid the same fate.
To pass the time before graduation, Michael hangs out at The Echo where he can dance and forget about his father’s angry words, the pressures of school, and the looming threat of AIDS, a disease that everyone is talking about, but no one understands.
Then he meets Gabriel, a boy who actually sees him. A boy who, unlike seemingly everyone else in New York City, is interested in him and not James. And Michael has to decide what he’s willing to risk to be himself.
Michael is content to live in the shadow of his best friends, James, an enigmatic teen performance artist who everyone wants and no one can have and Becky, who calls things as she sees them, while doing all she can to protect those she loves. His brother, Connor, has already been kicked out of the house for being gay and laying low seems to be his only chance to avoid the same fate.
To pass the time before graduation, Michael hangs out at The Echo where he can dance and forget about his father’s angry words, the pressures of school, and the looming threat of AIDS, a disease that everyone is talking about, but no one understands.
Then he meets Gabriel, a boy who actually sees him. A boy who, unlike seemingly everyone else in New York City, is interested in him and not James. And Michael has to decide what he’s willing to risk to be himself.
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