The Book of Lost Friends

The Book of Lost Friends is very contemporary and at the same time quite traditional in its gender definition of a woman. A novel clearly celebrates the modern, independent, empowered woman in focusing on both the heroic adventures of Juneau Jane and Hannie and, a century later, in Benny’s heroic rise to the challenge of teaching. Yet the novel as well advocates a distinctly conservative, traditional theme: the power of the maternal bond. Neither Benny or Hannie is entirely complete without the energy, love, and support of motherhood.

As a split narrative, The Book of Lost Friends examines the emotional power of the maternal bond. At the emotional center of the life narratives of both Benny and Hannie is their relationship to motherhood. Benny admits in the closing pages that she pines to be with a daughter she held for only a few moments before giving her up for adoption. Hannie clings to the homemade necklace gifted to her by her mother, the only tie she has for more than a decade, the only assurance she has that someday she will see her mother again. A mother who longs for her daughter, a daughter who longs for her mother, the novel invests in that relationship the definition of identity and the integrity of that identity. Without that dynamic, neither woman accepts who they are. Both feel incomplete, apart, lost.

Hannie declares at the darkest moments of her journey to find her long lost mother declares that despite the apparent drift into homelessness, “I do belong to somebody” (117). Her heart-wrenching dreams of her mother bring her both comfort and agony. As she sleeps, she resists returning to consciousness, eager to dwell within the dreamworld feeling of being with her mother. When at last Hannie reunites with her mother, the moment is suffused with a kind of magical, nearly-transcendent aura: “A shadow stands in the door then, and the shadow takes on sun as it comes out. There is the face I’ve kept in my mind all these years. I know it, even though the is gray round it, and the body stooped over a bit” (360).

Initially Benny seems caught up in her new role as teacher and in the first stirrings of emotion for Nathan Gossett. She makes veiled references to her past, to a secret she keeps. The revelation that closes the novel radically alters the understanding of Benny. Just pages after Hannie falls so completely into the arms of her lost mother, Benny declares that one day, “when the time is right,” she will seek out her daughter and finally hold in her arms the “baby girl I held for less than a half-hour before a nurse whisked her from my arms, replacing her with […] papers I was expected to sign” (374). As one mother and child reunite, another mother begins the long journey toward her reunion.  

Thinking through the implications of the impoverished lives that her students must endure, Benny acknowledges how easy it would be to give up hope. She recalls her own difficult childhood and how the past haunts her. “[My students] reenforced my own insecurities and the very that my very existence in this world was an inconvenience, a mistake,” she notes (300). Despite each of the principal characters facing enormous difficulties that easily encourage despair, the novel affirms the need for hope. It offers, in turn, a consoling message of inspiration. Despair is not the last word.

The handmade leather-bound book that Juneau and Hannie compile on the road, testifies to the hundreds of shattered families, victims of slavery and institutionalized racism, that refuse to accept hopelessness. Leaving their story in the book testifies to a hope that somewhere, somebody might respond, which is better than surrender.

With the exception of Juneau Jane, who is thwarted by a legal system that refuses her claim to a family identity, each principal character finds a way to authentic hope. Hope compels Hannie. Even when the journey through Texas seems most hopeless, even when she is jailed, even when she begins to realize just how big the territory of Texas is, she refuses to abandon hope. She clings to her necklace and its blue beads and the promise it symbolizes. Even when Nathan acknowledges the depth of his loss over his sister’s death, even as he struggles with accepting the reality of his own family’s century-old crimes, even as he edges toward accepting a life alone and apart, he finds his way to trust Benny and in turn to begin the difficult work of healing. And Benny, her students won over, her job secure, hints that perhaps someday she will be ready to seek out her own lost daughter, her “own Lost Friend” (374). She is, after all, a self-described optimist.

That closing affirmation, from a character who for the entire novel refused even to acknowledge the pain of her lost daughter, testifies to Benny’s own evolution into a resilient hope.