Before We Were Yours

Article written by Victor Onuorah

Degree in Journalism from University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

Gripping and captivating, Lisa Wingate’s ‘Before We Were Yours’ focuses on the Foss family and takes a deep dive into the investigation of the scandalous activities of Georgia Tann, who is not only a character in Lisa Wingate’s book but also a real-life child trafficker who lived during this period.

Key Facts About Before We Were Yours

• Book Title: ‘Before We Were Yours’
• Author: Lisa Wingate
• Language: English
• Antecedents: Economic hardship caused by the event of The Great Depression, and the subsequent illegal child care activities perpetrated at the Tennessee Children’s Home Society (TCHS).
• Publication Date: 2017
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Genre: Historical Fiction
• Setting: 1939, Memphis, Tennessee. Aiken, South Carolina
• Total Page Number: 384 Pages
• Climax: When Avery stumbles upon the truth that her grandmother, Judy, is one of the seven stolen children of Queenie Foss.

Lisa Wingate and Before We Were Yours

The history of the stolen children in Memphis Tennessee caught the eye of Lisa Wingate, who agreed the level of the catastrophe had a sustained impact on her imagination.

Lisa Wingate, who is a mother of two children – all-male, understood the degrees of pain the victims and their parents must have faced during these mean acts. Scenarios like a child dressing up and going out to the school in the morning but never coming back because they’ve been stolen – became the order of the day.

The height of it was that when parents updated authorities about their missing children, no real help was offered because the majority of the law enforcement agents in Memphis were accomplices to the plot and had their cut in revenue for every successful child abduction.

For Lisa Wingate, the story was deeply touching and stayed with her, and the only way to extricate herself from it was to write a novel off it; creating fictional characters that make up the Foss Family so that she could install, in the same amount, those degrees of pain and suffering felt by the real people who lived it.

Books Related to Before We Were Yours

Lisa Wingate’s ‘Before We Were Yours,’ in many aspects, has a resemblance to a lot of other books written by different authors. For one thing, the book is related to Min Jin Lee’s ‘Pachinko’ for the fact that it’s based upon an important historical time – and takes a cue from a certain significant event that has happened a long time ago.

For another thing, Lisa Wingate’s ‘Before We Were Yours’ also plays with time setting through flashbacks and flash-forwards – often drifting from the present into the past and vice versa, making an inch similar to H. G. Wells‘ ‘The Time Machine’, although unlike the Wells’ that uses a specialized contraption, Wingate opts for a drifting through time with the mind.

The Lasting Impact of Before We Were Yours