A Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker writer tells the story of losing her father and finding the love of her life in this profound meditation on grief and joy. Eighteen months before her beloved father died, Kathryn met Casey, the woman who would become her wife. Lost & Found weaves together their love story with Kathryn's story of losing her father in a brilliant exploration of the way families are lost and found and the ways life dispenses wretchedness and suffering, beauty and grandeur all at once. So much has been written about loss--and Schulz writes with painful clarity about the vicissitudes of grieving her father--but here she writes about the vital phenomenon of finding. The book is organized into three parts: "Lost," which explores the sometimes comic, sometimes frustrating, sometimes heartbreaking experience of losing things, grounded in Kathryn's account of her father's death; "Found," which examines the experience of discovery, from new ideas to new planets, grounded in her story of falling in love; and finally, "And," which contends with the way these events happen in conjunction and imply the inevitable: life keeps going on, not only around us but beyond us and after us. Kathryn Schulz has the ability to measure the depth and breadth of human experience with unusual exactness--she articulates the things all of us feel but have been unable to put into language. Lost & Found is a work of philosophical interrogation as well as a story about life, death and the discovery of one great love just as another is being lost. Reviews: "Kathryn Schulz has a singular way of turning a familiar idea around and around until it becomes cosmic, geological, wondrous. In Lost & Found, she moves between the philosophical and the intimate, turning a memoir of love and death into an exploration of the way chance becomes fate and grief intertwines with gratitude. To read her is to be quietly amazed at hidden depths and histories—as if you were to discover a map of a continent written in the palm of your hand."—Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror "This is an extraordinary gift of a book, a tender, searching meditation on love and loss and what it means to be human. Schulz has a remarkable ability to meld deep erudition and incisive critical enquiry with lyricism and hard-won personal wisdom. I felt so many different things reading it; I wept at it, laughed with it, was entirely fascinated by it. I emerged feeling a little as if the world around me had been made anew."—Helen MacDonald, author of H is for Hawk "Kathryn Schulz's Lost & Found is a deeply moving, richly illuminating exploration of loss and bliss, an examination of how grief and joy are connected not just by simultaneity, but in their very fabric: grief as a measure of joy, joy as a foreshadowing of grief. This book is a deeply personal account of losing a father and finding a wife, but its curiosity is thrillingly omnivorous—it explores everything from meteorites and alphabets to mythic valleys of lost objects. Schulz's voice is somehow wry, tender, rigorous, awestruck and lucid all at once. She's never anything but the very best company, speaking nuanced truths from and about the deepest reaches of the heart."—Leslie Jamison, author of Make it Scream, Make it Burn About the Author: Katrhryn Schulz is a staff writer at The New Yorker. In 2015, she won a National Magazine Award and the Pulitzer Prize for an article about seismic risk in the Pacific Northwest. Her book, Lost & Found, grew out of "Losing Streak," a New Yorker story that was anthologized in The Best American Essays 2018. Her other essays and reporting have appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The Best American Travel Writing and The Best American Food Writing. A native of Ohio, she now lives on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. |
