How do you find someone who isn’t missing?
At nineteen, Eulalie “Lalie” Bergh enters Camden House and finds six strangers who refuse to stay strangers. Together, they make a private mythology out of ordinary institutional time: rituals, invented titles, charcoal drawings, imaginary dinner guests, and the dangerous relief of being legible to one another.
Years later, after first love, psychosis, and grief have rearranged what Lalie trusts about reality, the people who know her best face a stranger problem: finding someone who has not technically disappeared.
The Foundlings is a literary novel about memory, chosen family, and the peculiar ways people assemble themselves into a household when the first one doesn’t hold.
I had become very good at pretending Will was still alive.
A little, not everything.
Jacqueline Augustine is a Wisconsin-based writer living with her husband and son in a charmingly mundane life the Foundlings would have appreciated.
She writes literary fiction about memory, attachment, grief, chosen family, and the strange work of finding one another. The Foundlings is her debut novel.
I am interested in the moment a person becomes real to someone else.