Is there some part of us that holds unresolved childhood trauma? Do we have childhood trauma? I don't think I do. I have some bad memories and stuff, but nothing traumatic. Nothing as bad as abandonment issues and lingering pain. This is 'Lost Child' by Joyce Carol Oates, published in The New Yorker on September 13, 2026.
Katherine Carpenter is in her mid-fifties, a consultant at the university art museum. She asked her friend out for lunch one day. She tells her friend about an incident in her childhood. She was then just Kit, "Maybe four years old. Maybe three." Her Daddy took her out but it wasn't for fun. She went along with her Daddy to the hospital, to the bank, and then she was left all alone in an elevator on the eighth floor of the hospital.
The story shifted to another narrator — the adult Katherine's friend. This friend didn't understand why it was so urgent to meet for lunch, with short notice, but she went anyway. She was surprised that Katherine ordered a frothy pink alcoholic drink today, when she usually never drinks. She wasn't sure how much to check in with Katherine. This narrator is not given to emotions or allowing herself to from deeper emotional bonds.
Our lunches at the Purple Onion are often lively, festive. The laughter of women together, without men. Divorcées, widows. When the ex-husband dies, the divorcée becomes an honorary widow. At another lunch, we’d welcomed Katherine to this status, amid much laughter.
Today feels odd, just Katherine and me. As if the world has shrunk.
We live in a small town—officially, a village—a university community. We can recognize when one of us is, but also isn’t, herself.
The first wrong thing: Katherine ordered a drink as soon as we were seated. Katherine Carpenter, who never drinks. She did this with a giddy, embarrassed laugh to acknowledge and deflect my curiosity, explaining that today was “sort of a special day, an anniversary.”
We learnt that this is the "anniversary" of Kit's abandonment by her Daddy when she was a child. She never saw her Mummy again either. Readers gathered that her mom was either ill, dead or somehow gone, and the dad tried to close her bank account and withdraw her money. Young Kit was taken away to live with her Aunt in another city twenty miles away. This Aunt is her mother's older half-sister, someone she doesn't know.
She never knew how her mom died, except that she died in hospital. She didn't know why her Daddy abandoned her. She had questions that haven't been answered. After all these years, middle-aged Katherine is still haunted by the day she was abandoned as Kit. Some part of her is still Kit, and that's the part that hurts her most every day on this day that she was abandoned.
Surrounded by silence, like cotton batting, Kit grew up as an awkward stepdaughter-niece to her aunt, who had no children of her own, had never married, a highly educated woman who’d made her way in a male-dominated field, corporate tax law.
Kit, who became Kathy in high school and college, and, in graduate school and beyond, Katherine.
But still, she says, she is Kit.
Still waiting by the elevator.
Of course, she looked for answers. Not systematically but haphazardly, secretly. Telling no one, no lover, no husband, no close friend.
The story ended with the narrator-friend, who oddly put aside her caution for forming emotional bonds. She hovered protectively over her friend. She knew Katherine is exhausted by the pain of being alone on this day with questions in her mind that nobody alive seemed to have been able to answer for decades.
Katherine was positively mortified that she broke down and showed weakness in front of a friend. Someone who she isn't very close to to begin with. You could meet someone every other week or so, and yet not be close because it's just functional, not emotional. However, the friend chose kindness in the face of vulnerabiliy. The narrator-friend offered a hand and a shoulder to Katherine, and genuinely meant it. She said,
Like Katherine, I am exhausted. I rise from my chair as Katherine stumbles to her feet, as if to flee the restaurant to spare me further embarrassment, but I have hold of her, I am holding her, the sparrow bones so light, the reddened eyes, my arms are holding Katherine upright and steady, and to those strangers who have been watching us covertly I say, What are you staring at? This is none of your business. I am comforting my friend.
In an interview with Deborah Treisman, the author is asked about the third voice in the story, but one who didn't have the perspectives of Kit as a child and the adult Katherine.
There is a third voice in the story—that of the friend to whom Katherine is recounting her sad past. This woman—the only first-person voice—is a casual friend, not a close confidante; she is also not someone who feels or expresses a lot of emotion. Why do you think Katherine chose her for these revelations?
One of the discoveries of late middle age and beyond is that people we’ve known socially may sometimes reveal facets of themselves that we hadn’t suspected. As soon as a woman becomes a widow, for instance, she will discover the company of other widows, or widowers—a realignment of social priorities. Someone you did not know well may suddenly emerge and build a new connection. Of course, this could be a new romance, too, but the forging of new emotional attachments and intimacies in friendship is probably less noticed, or explored, even as it is more frequent and, to my mind, more interesting than conventional romance.
There's this opinion that our social circles and emotional lives narrow or solidify as we age. The circles become smaller. We lose friends from either death or distance. Or somehow we age in different directions, and as our older selves, we no longer identify with the friendships of our youth.
I share the views in this story that later life is a fluid, dynamic period for new and profound human connections. It's not that difficult to make new friends as we get older. We're just more aware of how 'close' we want these new friends to be. New friendships might be held at arm's length, but with warmth. Or you could choose to open up completely, knowing that this open-ness and such wouldn't be reciprocated.
Connections that form as we age might hold less pretence; without the social obligations of youth or the career networking requirements of middle-age.
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