Lost & found A memoir

Kathryn Schulz

Large print - 2022

"Eighteen months before her beloved father died, Kathryn Schulz met Casey, the woman who would become her wife. 'Lost & Found' weaves together their love story with the story of losing Kathryn's father in a brilliant exploration of the way families are lost and found and the way life dispenses wretchedness and suffering, beauty and grandeur all at once."--

Saved in:

1st floor Show me where

LARGE PRINT/BIOGRAPHY/Schulz, Kathryn
1 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
1st floor LARGE PRINT/BIOGRAPHY/Schulz, Kathryn Checked In
Subjects
Genres
Autobiographies
Biographies
Published
New York : Random House Large Print [2022]
Language
English
Main Author
Kathryn Schulz (author)
Edition
First large print edition
Physical Description
301 pages (large print) ; 24 cm
ISBN
9780593508527
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

Schulz begins her lovely memoir on loss by quoting the great poet Robert Lowell: "Yet why not say what happened?" he asked. Why not indeed. Schulz admits that she always disliked euphemisms for dying. But then her father died and she began using the common expressions that we all use, like "passed away" and "no longer with us." Her deeply felt memoir, though, is more than a reflection on the loss of a parent. It is about the idea of loss in general ("of all the other things I had lost over time") and the passage of time. Loss can refer to many things of course, to something as simple, and affecting as the loss of a childhood toy, or to the loss of a wallet, or the loss of a presidential election. Loss, in other words, encompasses the "trivial and the consequential." But we also find things, and Schulz considers that in fresh and evocative ways as well. The genius of Lost & Found is in its quotidian nature: in the acknowledgment that the end of a life is not only normal but the "necessary way of things," as Schulz puts it. Schulz is a wonderful writer, poetic and profound, and Lost & Found is a poignant, loving, wise, and comforting meditation on grief from both a personal and collective perspective.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

"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. (Jan.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Journalist Schulz (Being Wrong) presents a charming and relatable portrait of her late father, in a memoir about processing grief and recognizing and learning from loss by finding new relationships and experiences. She describes the person she knew her father to be and highlights his own losses and findings in his colorful life. Then the narrative gently turns to showcase a burgeoning romantic relationship that overlaps with Schulz's grief; this development gives readers another character to love. Schulz collects profound insights into love, how relationships develop and grow, and the new things we continue to find in loved ones, even after they're gone. Is love discovered, uncovered, remembered? For Schultz, it can be all of the above, especially as her relationship with her wife Casey unfolds. VERDICT Overall, the narrative is somewhat philosophical and perhaps a little cerebral, as it discusses loss and seeking, but it's full of curiosity and a great deal of love and compassion that readers will relish. Recommended for most libraries and an excellent book club selection.--Amanda Ray, Iowa City P.L.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A Pulitzer Prize--winning New Yorkerstaff writer muses on the interconnectedness of loss and gain. Losing her father made Schulz feel all too keenly how a once "familiar world [could suddenly] feel alien and inaccessible." But in the year before he died, the author also met the woman whose presence would counterbalance her father's devastating absence. In this memoir, Schulz transforms this extraordinary coincidence of major life events--death and falling in love--into an extended, philosophically edged reflection on the meaning of losing and its opposite, finding. Starting with the former, Schulz examines etymology. "The verb 'to lose' has its taproot sunk in sorrow," she writes, but only around the 14th and 15th centuries did the word begin to expand in meaning to encompass "the circle of what we can lose." Drawing on such disparate topics as the sudden disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in 2014 and the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, Schulz observes that losses are devastating to us not just because "they defy reality but because they reveal it" in all its ephemeral fragility. In the second section, the tone lightens considerably as the author contrasts loss with two forms of finding: recovery, which "reverses the impact of loss," and discovery, which "changesour world." Her voice aglow with wonderment, Schulz then tells the story of how she met fellow writer C. A friend had introduced them via email, but the day they met, the author's brain began the "life-altering organization" that eventually led to Schulz's offering C. her dead father's wedding ring as a symbol of moving forward in love rather than remaining paralyzed for fear of future loss. Elegant and thought-provoking, Schulz's book is as much a celebration of the circle of life as it is an elegant reminder to all that "we are here to keep watch, not to keep." A searchingly intelligent memoir and psychological meditation. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Chapter 1 I have always disliked euphemisms for dying. "Passed away," "gone home," "no longer with us," "departed": although language like this is well-intentioned, it has never brought me any solace. In the name of tact, it turns away from death's shocking bluntness; in the name of comfort, it chooses the safe and familiar over the beautiful or evocative. To me, all this feels evasive, like a verbal averting of the eyes. But death is so impossible to avoid--that is the basic, bedrock fact of it--that trying to talk around it seems misguided. As the poet Robert Lowell wrote, "Why not say what happened?" Yet there is one exception to this preference of mine. "I lost my father": he had barely been dead ten days when I first heard myself use that expression. I was home again by then, after the long unmoored weeks by his side in the hospital, after the death, after the memorial service, thrust back into a life that looked exactly as it had before I left, orderly and daylit, its mundane obligations rendered exhausting by grief. My phone was lodged between my shoulder and my chin. While my father had been in a cardiac unit and then an intensive care unit and then in hospice care, dying, I had received a series of automated messages from the magazine where I work, informing me that I would be locked out of my email if I did not change my password. These arrived with clockwork regularity, reminding me that my access would expire in ten days, in nine days, in eight days, in seven days. It is remarkable how the ordinary and the existential are always stuck together, like the pages in a book so timeworn that the print has transferred from one to the other. I did not fix the password problem. I did lose the access and, with it, any means to solve the problem on my own. And so, after my father died, I found myself on the phone with a customer service representative, explaining, although it was absolutely unnecessary to do so, why I had neglected to address the issue in a timely fashion. I lost my father last week. Perhaps because I was still in those early, distorted days of mourning, when so much of the familiar world feels alien and inaccessible, I was struck, as I had never been before, by the strangeness of the phrase. Obviously my father hadn't wandered away from me like a toddler at a picnic, or vanished like an important document in a messy office. And yet, unlike other oblique ways of talking about death, this one did not seem cagey or empty. It seemed plain, plaintive, and lonely, like grief itself. From the first time I said it, that day on the phone, it felt like something I could use, as one uses a shovel or a bell-pull: cold and ringing, containing within it both something desperate and something resigned, accurate to the confusion and desolation of bereavement. Later, when I looked it up, I learned that there was a reason "lost" felt so apt to me. I had always assumed that, if we were referring to the dead we were using the word figuratively--that it had been appropriated by those in mourning and contorted far beyond its original meaning. But that turns out not to be true. The verb "to lose" has its taproot sunk in sorrow; it is related to the "lorn" in "forlorn." It comes from an Old English word meaning to perish, which comes from an even older word meaning to separate or cut apart. The modern sense of misplacing an object only appeared later, in the thirteenth century; a hundred years after that, "to lose" acquired the meaning of failing to win. In the sixteenth century we began to lose our minds; in the seventeenth century, our hearts. The circle of what we can lose, in other words, began with our own lives and each other and has been steadily expanding ever since. This is how loss felt to me after my father died: like a force that constantly increased its reach, gradually encroaching on more and more terrain. Eventually I found myself keeping a list of all the other things I had lost over time as well, chiefly because they kept coming back to mind. A childhood toy, a childhood friend, a beloved cat who went outside one day and never returned, the letter my grandmother wrote me when I graduated from college, a threadbare but perfect blue plaid shirt, a journal I'd kept for the better part of five years: on and on it went, a kind of anti-collection, a melancholy catalogue of everything of mine that had ever gone missing. Any list like this--and all of us have one--quickly reveals the strangeness of the category of loss: how enormous and awkward it is, how little else its contents have in common. I was surprised to realize, when I first began thinking about it, that some kinds of loss are actually positive. We can lose our self-consciousness and our fear, and although it is frightening to be lost in the wilderness, it is wonderful to be lost in thought or a book or a conversation. But those are happy outliers in an otherwise difficult region of human experience; for the most part, our losses lie closer in spirit to the death of my father, in that they diminish our lives. We can lose our credit card, our driver's license, the receipt for the item we need to return; we can lose our good name, our life savings, our job; we can lose faith and lose hope and lose custody of our children. Much of the experience of heartbreak falls into this category, since an unwanted breakup or divorce entails the loss not only of someone we love but also the familiar texture of our days and a cherished vision of the future. So, too, with serious illness and injury, which can lead to the loss of everything from basic physical abilities to fundamental parts of our identity. Some of our most intimate experiences are here, as when an expectant mother loses a pregnancy, alongside some of the most public and shattering events of history: war, famine, terrorism, natural disaster, pandemic--all the awful collective tragedies that establish the far extremity of what it is possible to lose. This is the essential, avaricious nature of loss: it encompasses, without distinction, the trivial and the consequential, the abstract and the concrete, the merely misplaced and the permanently gone. We often ignore its true scope if we can, but for a while after my father died, I could not stop seeing the world as it really is, marked everywhere by the evidence of past losses and the imminence of future ones. This was not because his death was a tragedy. My father died peacefully, at seventy-four, tended throughout his final weeks by those he loved most. It was because his death was not a tragedy; what shocked me was that something so sad could be the normal, necessary way of things. In its aftermath, each individual life seemed to contain too much heartbreak for its fleeting duration. History, which I had always loved even in its silences and mysteries, suddenly seemed like little more than a record of loss on an epic scale, especially where it could offer no record at all. The world itself seemed ephemeral, glaciers and species and ecosystems vanishing, the pace of change as swift as in a time-lapse, as if those of us alive today had been permitted to see it from the harrowing perspective of eternity. Everything felt fragile, everything felt vulnerable; the idea of loss pressed in all around me, like a hidden order to existence that emerged only in the presence of grief. This relentless disappearance is not the whole story of our lives; it is not even the whole story of this book. But in the weeks and months after my father died, I could not stop thinking about it, partly because it seemed important to understand what all of these losses had to do with each other and partly because it seemed important to understand what all of them had to do with me. A lost wallet, a lost treasure, a lost father, a lost species: as different as these were, they and every other missing thing suddenly seemed fundamental to the problem of how to live--seemed, in being gone, to have something urgent to say about being here. Excerpted from Lost and Found: A Memoir by Kathryn Schulz All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.