Lost & Found
A Memoir
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3.6 • 101 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A “profound and beautiful” (Marilynne Robinson) account of joy and sorrow from one of the great writers of our time, The New Yorker’s Kathryn Schulz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
“I will stake my reputation on you being blown away by Lost & Found.”—Anne Lamott, author of Dusk, Night, Dawn and Bird by Bird
WINNER OF THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL
ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: People
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, NPR, Oprah Daily, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Esquire, Vulture, She Reads, Book Riot, Publishers Weekly
One spring morning, Kathryn Schulz went to lunch with a stranger and fell in love. Having spent years looking for the right relationship, she was dazzled by how swiftly everything changed when she finally met her future wife. But as the two of them began building a life together, Schulz’s beloved father—a charming, brilliant, absentminded Jewish refugee—went into the hospital with a minor heart condition and never came out. Newly in love yet also newly bereft, Schulz was left contending simultaneously with wild joy and terrible grief.
Those twin experiences form the heart of Lost & Found, a profound meditation on the families that make us and the families we make. But Schulz’s book also explores how disappearance and discovery shape us all. On average, we each lose two hundred thousand objects over our lifetime, and Schulz brilliantly illuminates the relationship between those everyday losses and our most devastating ones. Likewise, she explores the importance of seeking, whether for ancient ruins or new ideas, friends, faith, meaning, or love. The resulting book is part memoir, part guidebook to sustaining wonder and gratitude even in the face of loss and grief. A staff writer at The New Yorker and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Schulz writes with curiosity, tenderness, and humor about the connections between joy and sorrow—and between us all.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In her astonishing memoir, journalist Kathryn Schulz expands her 2017 New Yorker essay about her father’s death into a brilliant meditation on the experience of loss. Schulz recounts her grief in exquisite detail, gently turning our attention to how much of life is spent confronting absence. “Each of us misplaces roughly nine objects per day,” she informs us. A missing wedding ring hardly compares to the loss of a spouse, but both are reminders of a fleeting existence. The flip side, which Schulz explores with equal tenderness, is what we find as we move through life: a family heirloom, love, a cure. When the author meets her wife in the book’s second section, we too feel the thrill of potential, which is all the more precious for being finite. Thought-provoking and occasionally melancholy, Lost & Found feels like a conversation with a wise friend.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Just as every grief narrative is a reckoning with loss, every love story is a chronicle of finding," writes Pulitzer Prize winner Schulz (Being Wrong) in this stunning memoir. As Schulz recounts, she contended with the pain and ecstasy of both narratives colliding when she fell in love with her future wife, C., 18 months before Schulz's father died. She explores the grief of loss and joy of finding through penetrating reflections on the life of her father, a deep thinker with an endless appetite for the world; an "intimate study of beloved" wife; and philosophical forays into literature, poetry, and art. She ruminates on the "intrinsic pleasure of discovery" in quest narratives, is reminded how "the entire plan of the universe consists of losing" when C. reads her Whitman's Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, and thinks of her father's memorial service, one of the "greatest parties I ever attended," when remembering C. S. Lewis's quote that "we all have... many bad spots in our best times, many good ones in our worst." By the end of these exquisite existential wanderings, Schulz comes to a quiet truce with her finding that "life, too, goes by contraries... by turns crushing and restorative... comic and uplifting." Schulz's canny observations are a treasure.
Customer Reviews
Amazing Read, Powerful, Sweet and Funny.
This is such an amazing depiction of grief and love. I picked this up on a whim after a particularly tough year and could not be happier I did. The way she describes the grief over father and the love of her wife brought such powerful feelings in me. It also really helped me change my perspective nicely.
Beautiful and Important
A beautiful piece of writing that touches the heart, and on these time especially is an important reminder of what life is about. Well done.
Lost And Found
Exquisite. language and insights intricately woven. Deep thoughts
about things you had never thought about before.