Lisa Wingate’s Before We Were Yours weaves together past and present to expose a real historical crime while tracing how love, loss, and truth echo across generations. Through Rill Foss’s fight to keep her siblings together and Avery Stafford’s quest to understand her inheritance, the novel asks what makes a family, how truth remakes identity, and why power must be held to account.
Major Themes
The Enduring Power of Family Bonds
At the novel’s core is the insistence that love-based kinship—by blood or by choice—survives separation, renaming, and time. Rill’s promise to protect her siblings shapes every decision she makes, and the later reunion between the sisters proves that affection and memory can outlast institutional attempts to erase them. In the present, Avery’s duty to her family expands into an ethic of restoration, widening the circle to include the relatives history tried to scatter.
Secrets and Their Consequences
Secrets in the novel both shield and shatter: they protect fragile lives while also producing decades of silence, grief, and disconnection. Judy’s hidden identity, the Staffords’ political concealments, and the falsified records of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society illustrate how private and institutional secrecy can redirect destinies. The cost is generational—loved ones live beside each other under borrowed names, and families bear burdens they cannot name.
The Search for Identity and Truth
Identity becomes an act of remembrance and recovery, not just inheritance. Avery’s investigation into a photograph and a few cryptic words becomes a moral education, moving her from scripted privilege to self-chosen purpose. Rill’s resistance to forced renaming shows the opposite struggle: to remain herself when the system insists she become someone new; truth, when finally voiced, reknits a self that history tried to unmake.
Corruption of Power and Exploitation of the Vulnerable
The novel indicts how authority—legal, medical, political—preys on those with the least leverage. Georgia Tann’s network converts children into commodities, protected by judges, police, and donors who benefit from sanitized narratives of “rescue.” A contemporary elder-care scandal echoes the past, showing that exploitation mutates but persists when oversight fails and profit eclipses dignity.
Supporting Themes
Memory and the Past
Trauma clings with specificity even as dementia blurs the edges; the past survives in objects, names, and stories that refuse to vanish. Fragmented recollections—“Arcadia,” a bracelet, a sister’s name—break secrecy’s spell, linking directly to the major themes of Family Bonds and Identity and Truth. Memory becomes both evidence and balm: proof that love once held and a pathway toward healing.
Social Class and Privilege
Class determines who is heard, who is believed, and who is taken. The Foss family’s poverty renders them legible to authorities as disposable, while affluent adoptive households (including the Staffords) unwittingly sustain the market that exploits the poor. This theme is the engine of Corruption of Power, explaining how exploitation scales behind a veneer of respectability.
Resilience and Survival
Endurance here is more than endurance; it is the capacity to build a meaningful life without denying the scars. Rill’s perseverance models how courage, love, and memory keep identity intact under pressure, linking resilience to both Family Bonds and the Search for Identity and Truth. Survival culminates not in forgetting, but in the strength to remember and still choose connection.
Theme Interactions
- Family Bonds ↔ Corruption of Power: Institutions attempt to fracture kinship; love and memory resist, culminating in reunion and repair.
- Secrets → Identity and Truth: Hidden histories shape lives; the pursuit of truth dismantles secrecy and restores a coherent self.
- Social Class → Exploitation: Privilege enables and purchases exploitation; poverty supplies its victims.
- Memory ↔ Secrets: Flashes of recollection puncture official lies; the frailty of memory adds urgency to recording the truth.
- Resilience ← Family Bonds + Truth: Love sustains endurance; truth gives suffering shape and the possibility of closure.
Together, these dynamics drive the dual narrative from dispossession toward reclamation, showing how private acts of loyalty counter public systems of abuse.
Character Embodiment
Rill Foss (later May Crandall) embodies the fusion of Family Bonds, Resilience, and Identity. Her vow to protect her siblings defines her moral world, while her resistance to erasure—clinging to the name Rill—shows identity as an act of will and remembrance.
Avery Stafford personifies the Search for Identity and Truth intersecting with Secrets and Privilege. Beginning as the heir to a carefully managed legacy, she becomes a truth-teller who reframes what inheritance means, choosing responsibility over convenience.
Judy (Fern) Stafford crystallizes Secrets and Memory. Her dementia-fractured recollections expose both the harm secrecy inflicts and the stubborn persistence of love that outlives language.
Georgia Tann is the face of Corruption of Power and the ideology that renders people “blank slates.” Her respectable public image masks a marketplace that converts vulnerability into currency.
Queenie and Briny Foss embody Family Bonds and the pressures of Social Class. Their love anchors the children’s sense of self, even as their marginalization leaves the family exposed to predation.
The Stafford family elders represent Social Class and Privilege complicated by Secrets. Their influence affords protection but also temptations to conceal; reckoning with the past becomes the test of whether power will enable justice or perpetuate harm.
Across these figures, the novel turns abstract ideas—love, truth, power—into lived choices, showing how individual courage can contest systemic wrongs and restore what was stolen.