"Lost & Found started as a piece in the New Yorker that I read and loved, so I was thrilled to hear Schulz was expanding it into a memoir. People in the book business are often asked to “name a book that changed your life.” This is my new answer— if by “changed your life” we mean that “my understanding of the universe rearranged itself” (as Schulz says at one point). The “Lost” section about her father dying and her meditation on grief, mourning, and loss in general is both riveting and heartbreaking. The “Found” section about finding the woman she married is up there with the best things on love I’ve ever read. The “&” section where she brings everything together with erudition, wisdom, and heart is breathtaking. For my money this book has everything."
Publisher Random House
Publication Date 2022-01-11
Section New Hardcover - Biography
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9780525512462
An enduring 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
“Our lives do indeed deserve and reward the kind of honest, gentle, brilliant scrutiny Schulz brings to bear on her own life. The book is profound and beautiful.” —Marilynne Robinson, author of Housekeeping and Gilead
Eighteen months before Kathryn Schulz’s beloved father died, she met the woman she would marry. In Lost & Found, she weaves the stories of those relationships into a brilliant exploration of how all our lives are shaped by loss and discovery—from the maddening disappearance of everyday objects to the sweeping devastations of war, pandemic, and natural disaster; from finding new planets to falling in love.
Three very different American families form the heart of Lost & Found: the one that made Schulz’s father, a charming, brilliant, absentminded Jewish refugee; the one that made her partner, an equally brilliant farmer’s daughter and devout Christian; and the one she herself makes through marriage. But Schulz is also attentive to other, more universal kinds of conjunction: how private happiness can coexist with global catastrophe, how we get irritated with those we adore, how love and loss are themselves unavoidably inseparable. The resulting book is part memoir, part guidebook to living in a world that is simultaneously full of wonder and joy and wretchedness and suffering—a world that always demands both our gratitude and our grief.
A staff writer at The New Yorker and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Kathryn Schulz writes with curiosity, tenderness, erudition, and wit about our finite yet infinitely complicated lives. Crafted with the emotional clarity of C. S. Lewis and the intellectual force of Susan Sontag, Lost & Found is an uncommon book about common experiences.
