Lost Here Before

arts, books, society, culture · EN

He spent the summer of 1989 backpacking across Europe with his best friend. She spent it waiting on a plane ticket he wasn't sure he wanted to send. Almost forty years later, they still don't remember it the same way. Lost Here Before is a podcast about making a first novel and about the true stories beneath the fiction. That summer: Tiananmen Square on the TV, the Berlin Wall still standing but not for much longer, the map of the world about to be redrawn. A twenty-three-year-old with a camera, no real plan, and a free plane ticket is loose in the middle of it, mistaking the open road for freedom. That mistake, confusing keeping your options open with actually being free, turns out to be what the book is about. Decades later, the man he became found the journal he kept that summer on a forgotten hard drive, and realized he'd been carrying a novel around for most of his life. What makes it unusual: the woman at the center of the novel is rea