The Lost Boy

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1997

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapter 10-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

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Important Quotes

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Themes

The Search for Home and Family

The search for home and family is the overarching theme of Pelzer’s memoir. Because of his early experiences of abuse and neglect, David feels as if he has no real home or family while he is living with his parents. Since his mother abuses him and isolates him from his brothers, and his father fails to adequately defend him from her mistreatment, he does not feel safe in their house or as if he is part of the family. Once he is placed in the foster care system, David longs to find a home and family where he feels safe, loved, and accepted. He starts to feel at home while he is living with Lilian and Rudy Catanze, who give him the affection and support that he never received from his own parents. As a young adolescent, however, he gets so wrapped up in trying to understand why his family isolated and mistreated him that he starts misbehaving and eventually has to leave the Catanzes’ home. His fixation on his troubled parents and broken home eventually leads to him getting involved with John and sentenced to time in the juvenile penitentiary.

After returning from Hillcrest, David struggles to fit back in with the other foster children and no longer feels at ease in the Catanzes’ home. When he is removed from Rudy and Lilian’s care, he moves between a few different foster homes before he finally ends up living with Alice and Harold Turnbough, who he comes to consider his true mother and father. Nonetheless, he only fully realizes that they have become his true family after he temporarily leaves their care to live with John and Linda Walsh, who prove to be inadequate foster parents. When he returns to Alice and Harold’s home, he tells them that he now knows where he belongs (286). As he is saying goodbye to them when he is leaving for Air Force training, Alice gives him a key to their house and tells him, “This is your home. It always has been and always will be your home” (303). At this moment, David realizes that he, Alice, and Harold have become a family. The Epilogue reveals that as an adult, Dave establishes the family that he longed for as a child growing up in foster care. He has a son, whom he has named Stephen, after his father; unlike his own father, however, Dave is able to give his son a home in which he feels safe and loved.

Prejudice against Foster Children in American Society

Throughout the memoir, Pelzer attempts to counter misconceptions about the foster-care system in American society. At various points during his adolescence, David encounters prejudice against foster children. When he is in sixth grade, he is picked on by the other kids for being a foster child. His isolation from the other students leads to his friendship with John, which in turns leads to him getting involved in John’s criminal activities. When Lilian visits David at Hillcrest, she warns him that he needs to be on his best behavior because some people do not want to believe that children end up in foster care because of serious problems in their families, like domestic abuse and alcoholism. Instead, they believe that foster children have done something wrong to get taken away from their families and see any trouble they get into as confirmation that they were bad to begin with. This prejudice against foster children is explicitly demonstrated through the remarks of the woman who lives on Duinsmoore Drive and yells at David for talking to her daughter. She refers to David as “that F child” and declares that he must have done something “hideous” to end up in foster care (278). Pelzer’s memoir, which depicts David as a victim of child abuse and someone who works hard to become a more caring and responsible person than his parents, demonstrates that these beliefs about foster children are cruel and unfounded.

Pelzer also corrects the common misconception that foster parents take in children because of the money they get from the government. He depicts David’s various foster parents as kind and generous individuals who care deeply about their foster children. Not all David’s experiences with foster parents are positive; the Walshes get into violent quarrels in front of their young children, and Jody Jones is accused of statutory rape by one of his former foster children. Through the examples of Lilian and Rudy Catanze and Alice and Harold Turnbough, however, Pelzer shows the way foster care can offer children from troubled homes the love and support they were never able to get from their own families.

Coming of Age

While The Lost Boy focuses on David’s experiences with child abuse and the foster-care system, it is also a coming-of-age narrative; it chronicles David’s adolescence and the years in which he is starting to forge an identity for himself. For much of the memoir, he struggles to put his memories of his abusive mother behind him and continues to let his past shape how he thinks and acts. As he matures, however, he starts to realize that he needs to take responsibility for himself and his actions if he wants to be a better person than either of his parents. As a teenager, he demonstrates his increasing maturity and sense of responsibility by taking on many part-time jobs to earn money, making peace with his broken relationship with his father, and realizing that Alice and Harold have become the loving, supportive family he always longed for. As he is leaving California to begin his Air Force training, he realizes that he has gone from being a “lost boy” in foster care to “a man named Dave” (304).

An important moment in David’s growth occurs when he realizes that he needs to get away from the Bay Area so that he can finish growing up and can come to terms with his mother’s treatment of him in a place where he will not be constantly reminded of his traumatic childhood. He knows now that he will never get all the answers that he wants from his mother and that he needs to focus on the future, rather than fixating on the past. Consequently, he decides to join the Air Force and realize his lifelong dream of flying. The Epilogue reveals that David has grown up to become an admirable person who is completely different from his troubled parents; he has achieved success in the Air Force and has a happy home life with his son.