An unnamed woman narrates the first half of Lost Children Archive. She has studied and worked as a political journalist, and her expertise is in sound editing. She meets her future husband when they are assigned to co-collaborate on a New York City soundscape project. Though the close collaboration of the project brings the partners together romantically, the woman narrator has telling reservations about the project being “tacky, megalomaniacal, possibly too didactic” and “in part funded by some huge multinational corporations” (12). From the beginning of the novel, it is clear that this narrator has high political principals and is personally repulsed by injustice. She worries deeply about the (sometimes conflicting) documentary and artistic goals of her projects and is concerned by “didactic” work that manipulates the listener.

When the novel begins, the narrator finds herself in several in-between states. She has already been married (and has a five-year-old daughter from a previous marriage), and she feels as though her second marriage may be nearing its end. She and her husband have completed the soundscape project that brought them—and their two children from previous marriages—together, and she is currently wondering how to go about her latest project: a record of different stories from migrant refugees.