The Mother/Wife

The mother and wife of the family at the novel's center is one of the primary narrators of Lost Children Archive. She is a young woman married for the second time with a daughter from her first marriage. As a documentarist, she meets her current husband while working on a soundscape documenting the languages of New York City. After falling in love with him, they marry and merge their families into one. Their marriage begins to devolve, however, after they finish working on their collective project and their career interest diverge.

She begins to realize the significant distancing growing between them as her husband withholds an increasing number of details about his new project from her. In an attempt, perhaps, to reclaim her selfhood, she begins conceptualizing her own new documentary explorations. After meeting the mother of own of her son's classmates at school, Manuela, the...