Lost & Found: A Memoir

4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars | 942 ratings

Price: 15.75

Last update: 10-14-2024


About this item

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.


Top reviews from the United States

Scott Kuffel
5.0 out of 5 stars Far beyond a memoir
Reviewed in the United States on March 6, 2024
This book reads as both a love story and also an existential lecture on the need to appreciate life. The writing is so rich and empowering that as a reader I found myself connecting far beyond the text to my own past and my own future. A truly wonderful reading experience!
Lee
5.0 out of 5 stars Spoke to My Heart
Reviewed in the United States on November 2, 2023
Like Kathryn and Casey, I found a beautiful, deeply connected love with my spouse, Carol. She was the center of my life for 47 years, and we couldn't have asked for a more perfect union. Neither of us could imagine being the one left when one of us died. That role fell to me in 2017. I felt like Carol and I continued the story that Kathryn and Casey began.

It was so familiar to read about how Kathryn grappled with the fear of losing Casey and the ways she worked on not allowing it to pull her from life's present pleasures. Last month, I finished a manuscript about my journey through grief. I describe how I went from standing at the edge of a black abyss that was drawing me in to confronting the challenges of my altered world. I began to see not only what I lost but all I gained from living in the presence of the one I loved so dearly. The love we shared gave me the foundation on which I could gradually learn to stand.

Kathryn may never see this review, but I'm here to tell her and others like her that going through this transition takes a ton of courage, but gratitude for what we had and continue to have together makes it possible to grow around the sadness and find new meaning in life.

Lost and Found is a beautifully written book about love and loss and the ways we're all a jumbled mass of feelings related to both as we forge our way through the years. May we all have a rich, happy life together before we need to face any separation, and may we all know that love never ends. Never.
emmejay
4.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful, Gentle Memoir
Reviewed in the United States on January 11, 2024
"Grief confuses us by spinning us around to face backward, because memories are all we have left, but of course it isn’t the past we mourn when someone dies; it’s the future."

This is a beautiful and gentle memoir of losing and finding -- with some philosophy/literature about the two experiences, but largely explored as a eulogy of her father as she comes to terms with his death (I grew fond of Schulz and everyone in her family), and as an homage to the woman who is now her wife.

"What an astonishing thing it is to find something."
. . .
"Overnight, I had become someone who wanted to hold someone’s hand on the way to breakfast."
Wombat Mayhem
5.0 out of 5 stars One of my favorite books EVER
Reviewed in the United States on September 30, 2024
I think I've purchased ten copies of this gorgeous book. It was a favorite gift to give last year. Highly recommend.
John E. Pepper
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the most moving, mind opening and heart nurturing book I ever read
Reviewed in the United States on April 30, 2022
I originally picked this book up from the library. After reading half of it, I ordered my own copy for fastest possible delivery. knew it was a book I would treasure, turn to many times, underline sections beyond counting and tab one page after another. That is exactly what happened.

Kathryn Schultz brings us into her world and makes it our world--a world mixing love and loss, mortality and the amazement that we exist at all. She does this with wide open eyes to reality, in its splendor and sometimes grief, conscious but not depressed indeed inspired by its finitude.

Her writing conveys timeless, human insights in words and thoughts that are clear and poetic and caused me to pause and ponder their relationship to my own life and that of the love of my life, my wife Francie. You can't ask more of a book than this in my opinion.
Amazon Customer
3.0 out of 5 stars Don't understand the buzz
Reviewed in the United States on March 21, 2023
While she's a great wordsmith, this is honestly not a great read. The section about the loss of her father is very resonate and she does a good job taking that loss and generalizing it to the wider losses everyone suffers and how we cope.

The "found" essay is tiresome, to be frank. It's so personal, and so gushy, I felt like I was reading a middle school girl's essay about luuuuv. It also goes on much much too long. Their life is precious and a bit pretentious and it doesn't translate very well to a larger point.

The "and" section really runs off the rails as far as focus, but it is so short you feel like author realized that and just tried to wrap it up. All in all, the ecstatic reviews puzzle me, because I had a hard time wanting to finish this.
@BobbyGvegas
5.0 out of 5 stars I am rarely at a loss for apt words.
Reviewed in the United States on May 7, 2024
But, this is one of those infrequent times. I am a long time, Kathryn reader and fan. The other day I was citing passages from her book “Being Wrong” on my main blog. I noticed this memoir listed on Amazon, so I downloaded it. I put everything else aside and read it all the way through. Yikes.

I thoroughly enjoyed every facet of it. I was just having a thought today, imagining that I could take its contents and turn the prose into wallpaper and amble around my house so I could just walk around rereading parts of it as though they were museum wall hangings. The erudition was no surprise (Pulitzer no mystery) as was her broad and deep knowledge of a number of sophisticated and important domains. What really got me, though, was the often aching personal candor (including self doubts), the detailed sharing of private life details. I am totally pleased with the personal happiness she has found. I would have loved to have known her father. The Schulz family has added a ton of good to this world.

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