Summary: Before We Were Yours

The GIST

Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate is a 2017 novel built on a piece of American history that most people have never heard of and few can believe when they do. From the 1920s until 1950, a woman named Georgia Tann ran the Memphis-based Tennessee Children's Home Society, a respectable-looking adoption agency that took children from poor families and sold them to wealthy ones all over the country. Wingate's characters are invented. The scandal is not.

The book tells two stories a couple of generations apart: a twelve-year-old girl fighting to hold her brother and sisters together inside Tann's system in 1939, and a privileged young lawyer in the present day who stumbles on a secret in her own family. Wingate, the author of more than thirty novels, spent years researching Tann's crimes, and the result became her breakthrough. It reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list, stayed on the list for fifty-four weeks in hardcover, sold more than two million copies, and was translated into over forty languages. People called it a poignant, engrossing tale about sibling love and the toll of secrets, and it has become a book-club fixture, the kind of novel readers press on their friends with a warning to keep tissues nearby.

The Story

Memphis, 1939

Rill Foss is twelve, the eldest of five children who live aboard a shantyboat on the Mississippi River. Their parents, Queenie and Briny, have almost no money and a great deal of love. To an outsider the Fosses are river trash. To the children the life is close to magic: drifting, fishing, free, with a mother and father who represent everything warm and safe. Rill has never wanted anything else.

Then, one stormy night, Queenie goes into a difficult labor. She is carrying twins, and something is wrong. Briny has no choice except to rush her to the hospital, and he leaves Rill in charge of the little ones until he gets back. He does not get back in time. Strangers arrive at the boat in force, and all five children are taken away.

They are delivered to a home run by the Tennessee Children's Home Society. The adults there tell them it is only for a little while, and that they will be returned to their mother and father soon. It does not take Rill long to grasp the dark truth: nobody intends to send them home. As for the newborn twins, they are taken straight from the hospital to a different place, and the older children never see them.

Inside the home, the Foss children are stripped of who they were. They are given new names. Rill is now to answer to May. The facility is ruled by a cruel director, with Georgia Tann herself presiding over the whole enterprise, and the children in it are neglected, frightened and mistreated. Some of the other children fold under it, some turn hard, and some simply go quiet; the way each one responds is part of what makes these chapters so difficult to forget. Well-dressed couples come to look the children over. Those couples have been led to believe that every child on offer was an orphan or was willingly given up.

Rill has one purpose: keep her sisters and her brother together, and somehow get them all back to the river. She is clever and stubborn and far too young for the job. One at a time her siblings are picked out, adopted or moved to another location, and every loss lands on her as a personal failure, since her father told her to watch them. Before long she is clinging to the last of them, her small sister Fern. The loving, happy river girl begins to harden into something else, a wary, beaten-down adult in a child's body, still gripping her real name and her memory of who they all were before. Whether she can hold on to either, and whether there is still a home on the river to go back to, is what her half of the book has to answer.

Aiken, South Carolina, present day

Avery Stafford appears to have everything. She comes from two prominent Southern families. Her father is a distinguished senator. She has built her own career as a federal prosecutor, and she is engaged to a handsome man, with a lavish wedding on the horizon. She has come home because her father is being treated for cancer, and while she helps her parents through it, she is quietly being groomed to follow him into politics. Her life is polished, scripted and closely watched.

On a visit to a nursing home with her father, Avery has a brief, strange encounter with an elderly resident named May. The old woman seems to recognize something in her. Avery cannot shake it off, especially when she finds signs of a link between this stranger and her own beloved Grandma Judy, whose memory is now slipping away. There is an old photograph. There are things in her grandmother's past that do not add up.

Prying into family history is no part of the plan laid out for a senator's daughter in a delicate political season, and Avery knows it. A scandal, even an old one, is the last thing the Staffords need. She does it anyway. Her search pulls her away from the careful Stafford world, puts her in the path of a man who is nothing like her fiancé, and leads her toward the Tennessee Children's Home Society and the name Georgia Tann. The more she learns, the more she begins to question the future she was about to step into, and what her family's fine name is really built on.

Two stories, one river

Wingate alternates between the two timelines chapter by chapter. Rill's story comes in her own unmistakable voice, a river child's voice, observant and fierce. Avery's comes as a slow investigation, one clue and one reluctant conversation at a time. The stories draw steadily toward each other: a girl in an orphanage fighting to keep what is left of her family, and a woman decades later pulling on a thread that could lead, as the publisher puts it, either to devastation or to redemption. How the river children's fate connects to the Staffords, and what became of each Foss child, is what the novel is waiting to tell you.

What It's Really About

The bond between siblings. Rill's protective love for the younger children drives every choice she makes. The novel's deepest claim is that such a bond can outlast separation, new names, new families and years of silence, and that the heart keeps a record of where it belongs even when the paperwork has been rewritten.

Identity. The stolen children lose their parents, and then their names, their histories and their sense of who they are. Avery, who has never lacked for a name or a place, ends up asking the same thing Rill does: who am I, really, and who decided? One woman is fighting to remember who she was; the other is finding out that she never fully knew.

Secrets and the truth. Should a painful past stay buried to protect the living? The book takes the question seriously, and readers' guides to the novel ask whether the people who kept quiet were right to do so. Wingate comes down on the side of telling. Silence, she suggests, does its own slow damage, and healing begins with facing what happened.

A real injustice. Georgia Tann was a real person who used a position of trust for profit. She took children from poor families, sometimes by outright kidnapping, and placed them with wealthy clients, the film stars Joan Crawford and June Allyson among them. Thousands of children passed through her hands, and many died in her care. The Foss family is fictional, but it stands in for the real children, especially those who were old enough to know they had been stolen. The novel is also frank about class: how easily the poor could be judged unfit, and how readily the well-off believed whatever made the arrangement comfortable.

Survival. The children carry their scars for decades. The book's view is that surviving does not mean forgetting. It means living with courage in spite of the wound.

Readers adore the book for Rill, whose voice many say they cannot get out of their heads, and for the way it turns a hidden chapter of history into something deeply personal. The novelist Paula McLain praised Wingate for taking an almost unthinkable episode and making an enduring story of it; Jamie Ford said he was left in shock at its true-crime elements. The praise is not unanimous. Kirkus found the history vivid but thought the modern story less convincing, including Avery's inner conflict and her new romance, and many ordinary readers agree that the present-day chapters move more slowly and never quite match the force of the 1939 ones. Some also see a few of the revelations coming. Almost everyone describes the close of the book as bittersweet and hopeful, and leaves it there.

Who Should Read It

Lovers of emotional historical fiction, especially fans of Orphan Train or The Nightingale, or of writers such as Kristin Hannah and Christina Baker Kline, and any book club looking for a story that will get people talking about family, adoption, class and what we owe the past. It is not light reading: the mistreatment of children is central, and one reviewer suggests it for readers sixteen and older. Come ready to be angry and moved in about equal measure, and to want to know more about the true story once you are done. For that, Wingate later coauthored a nonfiction companion, Before and After, with Judy Christie.