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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 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. 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 will explore 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 and then to articulate the things all of us have felt 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 she is losing another.
About the author
Kathryn Schulz is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of Being Wrong. She won a National Magazine Award and a Pulitzer Prize in 2015 for 'The Really Big One', an article about seismic risk in the Pacific Northwest. Lost & Found grew out of 'Losing Streak', which was originally published in the New Yorker and later anthologized in The Best American Essays. 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 lives with her family on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
Summary
'Extraordinary . . . a profound and beautiful book . . . a moving meditation on grief and loss, but also a sparky celebration of joy, wonder and the miracle of love . . . Witty, wise and beautifully written' – The Sunday Times
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.
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.
'An extraordinary gift of a book, a tender, searching meditation on love and loss and what it means to be human. 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
Foreword
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 love, grief and joy.
Additional text
Pulitzer Prize-winner Kathryn Shulz's grief memoir offers clarity and wisdom on how loss and discovery are never far apart from one another.
