Found family is one of the most-loved tropes in queer fiction, and once you notice it, you see it everywhere: a ragtag group who choose each other, a home built from people who were never supposed to end up in the same room. But why does found family matter so much to LGBTQ+ readers specifically? I think the answer is simpler, and sadder, and more hopeful than most people realise.
What Found Family Actually Means
Found family is exactly what it sounds like: the people who become your family, not by blood or legal tie, but by choice. It's the friend who shows up at 2am without asking why. The found sibling who just gets it. The person who looks at you, all of you, and decides to stay anyway.
In fiction, found family usually shows up as a group thrown together by circumstance, who slowly become each other's safe place. It's the crew in a road trip story. The ragtag found-siblings in a survival story. The quiet, unspoken loyalty between two people who've both been let down by the family they were born into.
Why Found Family Matters So Much to LGBTQ+ Readers
For a lot of queer readers, found family isn't just a nice trope. It's a mirror.
Many LGBTQ+ people know, firsthand, what it feels like when the family you were born into can't or won't fully see you. Sometimes that's outright rejection. More often, it's something quieter: a parent who loves you but flinches at the wrong moment, a sibling who means well but doesn't quite get it, a home where you learn to edit yourself down to something smaller and safer.
Found family fiction offers something different: the possibility that you get to choose who stays. That love doesn't have to be earned by shrinking yourself. That the people who truly see you, and choose you anyway, are out there, even if they don't look like the family you started with.
That's why this trope lands so hard. It's not escapism exactly. It's closer to permission. Permission to imagine a version of home that doesn't require you to hide.
Found Family in My Own Books
I come back to this theme in almost everything I write, because it's the story I needed most growing up.
In Where We Belong, Blue spends the whole book learning that belonging isn't something you're given, it's something you build. His road trip starts as a search for the father who left him behind, but what he actually finds is something better: people who choose to stay, starting with Harry, who was never supposed to be part of the plan at all.
In What Remains, found family looks different again. When Bailey loses everyone he's ever known in a single night, the last thing he expects is to build something resembling a life with Benji, a guarded stranger with every reason to keep his distance. But that's the thing about found family: it rarely arrives looking the way you expected. Sometimes it looks like the person who should be a stranger, choosing to stay anyway.
Why I Keep Coming Back to This Theme
I'll be honest: I don't think I'll ever stop writing found family stories. Every book I write seems to circle back to the same question, who do you become when someone finally chooses you without conditions? That question feels endless to me, which is probably why I keep finding new ways to ask it.
If found family hits you the way it hits me, I hope you'll find a piece of that in Where We Belong or What Remains. And if you've got a found family story of your own, in fiction or in real life, I'd love to hear about it.