The Lost Boy

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1997

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapter 10-Epilogue

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Chapter 10-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 10 Summary: “Break Away”

During his sophomore year of high school, David starts working more than forty hours a week at various part-time jobs. Since he is seventeen, he only has one more year in foster care before he will have to provide for himself. He also starts trying to connect with his father, who is in San Francisco. When he hears that his father no longer works at his fire station, David tells Alice that he believes his father is in trouble and needs his help. He rides his motorcycle to San Francisco and goes to his father’s old station, where he meets his father’s friend and colleague, Uncle Lee. Uncle Lee tells him that his father has been drinking more than ever and was asked to retire early. A few weeks later, David goes back to San Francisco and finds his father in a rundown bar. They spend the afternoon together, and his father shows him the fireman’s badge that was awarded to him when he retired. He tells David that firefighting was the only thing in his life that he “didn’t screw up too badly” (297). David realizes that his father is dying from alcoholism and that he may never get another chance to spend time with his father. After leaving San Francisco, David cries all the way home thinking about his father’s lonely, miserable life.

In the summer of 1978, David gets a job selling cars. On the weekends, he continues to perform stunts with his friends, Dave and Paul, and to visit the Marshes and Mr. Brazell in Duinsmoore. To Alice’s chagrin, David decides to drop out of high school after his summer selling cars and begins working as a salesman fulltime. One day, after riding his motorcycle out to the Russian River, David realizes that if he wants to someday fulfill his childhood dream of living along the Russian River, he needs to “break away” and escape the area in which he grew up for a while. As a result, he decides to get his GED and join the Air Force. Before beginning basic training, he gets a call from his mother, who tells him that she wants nothing but the best for him. Although David wants to visit his mother after the phone call, Alice persuades him to stay away from her since she is most likely just “toying with [his] emotions” (303). As he says goodbye to Harold and Alice, he realizes he now considers them his parents and that he has finally found “the love of a family” (303).

Epilogue Summary

The epilogue takes place in December 1993 in Sonoma County, California. Like in the opening chapter, David–now called Dave–is sitting alone in the dark, shivering from cold. However, he is not shut in his mother’s garage but is instead exploring the wilderness around his second home, “the Rio Villa in Monte Rio” (307). After a distinguished career in the Air Force, Dave has returned to California and now has a son named Stephen. As he watches the seagulls on the bank of the river, Dave reflects on his struggles in foster care and cries as he thinks of “the mother and father [he] never had and the shame of the family secret” (307). He prays for the strength to be a better person and then returns home to spend the rest of his day playing board games with his son. In the early evening, the father and son walk down to the shore of the Russian River. Stephen hugs Dave’s leg, and says, “I love you, Dad. Happy birthday” (309). Dave thinks to himself how thankful he is that he has a family.

Chapter 10-Epilogue Analysis

The final chapter follows the final stages of David’s growing up. While still in high school, he starts to take more responsibility for himself by taking on several jobs. He is so successful in his summer job as a car salesman that he decides to leave high school to work fulltime and becomes one of the company’s top salesmen. After the recession hits, however, David realizes that he cannot continue in the job forever and decides that he needs to move away from the area in which he grew up to break free of his mother’s shadow and fully become his own person. Michael, Alice, and Harold are all proud of the maturity that David shows in choosing to go into the service. As David prepares to leave California on his first plane ride, he realizes that he is no longer “the lost boy” who grew up in foster care; he has instead become “a man named Dave” (304), the name of the final memoir in Pelzer’s trilogy.

During his teenage years, David makes a final attempt to connect with his father before accepting that his father will never be the parent that he desperately wants him to be. When he finally finds his father in San Francisco, he realizes that his father’s years of alcoholism and domestic misery have made rebuilding their relationship impossible. Before leaving, David tells his father that he loves him and is proud of his service as a firefighter and resolves to remember him as “the tall, rugged firefighter […] who placed himself in danger to help a fellow fireman or rescue a child from a burning building” (294-5).

Before leaving for Air Force training, David also has a long and emotional conversation with his mother on the phone, during which they both cry. While this show of emotion on his mother’s part makes David want to visit her, Alice reminds him that his mother has shown herself to be untrustworthy and instable in the past, and he realizes that seeing his mother will most likely only hurt him more. He now realizes that Alice and Harold are more his parents than either his mother or father and that he finally has a real home with them.

The Epilogue takes the narrative forward in time to when Dave has retired from the Air Force and is staying with his young son on a house along the Russian River. Like the first chapter, the Epilogue is written in italics to show that it takes place at a different time than the rest of the book. The flash-forward shows that Dave eventually realizes his dream of living on the Russian River and establishing a family of his own. It also reveals that he has named his son “Stephen,” after his father. Unlike his father, however, Dave gives his son the kind of parental support and stable, loving home that his parents never gave to him.