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Lost Here Before
Lost Here Before episodes
- The Ticket
A free plane ticket, anywhere in the world — grabbed on instinct at an airport gate in the summer of 1989. It's the small object the whole novel turns on, and it's where this story starts.
In the first episode of Lost Here Before, I introduce the book, the trip, and the woman at the center of both. How a forgotten file on an old hard drive turned into a novel almost forty years in the making. Why I picked up the phone to call someone I hadn't really spoken to in over a decade — and what it meant when she answered. And the first reading from the opening pages: a young man waking up next to the woman he's about to leave, already carrying more than he's willing to admit.
It starts out like a Gen X rom-com — a guy, his best friend, a Eurail pass, a girlfriend back home, and a free ticket he doesn't know what to do with — and then becomes something more honest: a true story told from two sides, and a young man who mistook keeping his options open for being free.
🎧 Episode 1 playlist (the real songs behind this episode) and more at the links.
Follow Lost Here Before on Substack, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Threads.
14 min
About Lost Here Before
From the publisher's feed
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 real, we're back in each other's lives, and she's helping me remember what happened — correcting me, filling in what I've lost, telling me how it looked from where she stood. She's writing a memoir of her own life, and our remembering together has become a thread in it. So this isn't one person's nostalgia trip. It's two people reconstructing the same summer from opposite sides, comparing notes, correcting each other, and discovering the story is truer told in stereo.
Each episode moves between two times.
- Then: the trip itself — London, Amsterdam, a gun-point shakedown on a train in Yugoslavia, and the reunion in Greece that was supposed to sort everything out.
- Now: what it's actually like to dig all of that up and put it on the page, with the other person on the phone reminding you how much you got wrong.
It's a time capsule, too — of a world before cell phones, when you'd go weeks without a word from home and leave messages on hostel bulletin boards; of the Detroit music scene, of punk and new wave, of the songs that built a couple of Gen-X kids into who they'd become. Every episode comes with a playlist of the real music behind it.
And it's honest, unsparingly, when it needs to be, about who these people were at twenty-three: the freedom they mistook for something it wasn't, the people they hurt, and what it costs to finally tell the truth about your own younger self.
Memory, as her mother used to say, is a funny thing.
You'll hear real recordings, short readings from the unfinished novel, and the stories that fiction was built from. The book isn't done yet. You're watching it get made.
New episodes regularly. Follow Lost Here Before on Substack, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, and Threads for the outtakes, "mixtapes," the photographs that survived, and word on when you'll finally be able to read the thing.