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.