A review by okiecozyreader
Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz
emotional
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
This is an interesting memoir - part memoir part scientific or maybe theoretical look at love and loss in different ways we see them in our lives. I first saw this book with the Goop bookclub and have been curious about it. Written by a Pulitzer Prize winning writer for The New Yorker, it is an eloquent look at all of love and loss.
Likewise, the book is broken up into 3 sections : lost (loss of her father especially), found (love), and “and” the joining of the two. She mentions in the goop interview that she didn’t want to be the focus of her memoir, but instead these two people that marked large moments of her life, and the close timing of her dad’s death about the time she met her love.
I Lost
“In the face of losses both large and small, one of our characteristic reactions is a powerful feeling of disbelief.” P18
“Experience and history both teach us that there is nothing on earth that cannot be lost - no matter it’s value, no matter it’s size (a Boeing 777), no matter how vigilantly we try to keep track of it. …
In the end, this may be why certain losses are so shocking: not because they defy reality but because they reveal it. One of the many ways that loss instructs us is by correcting our sense of scale, showing us the world as it really is: so enormous, complex, and mysterious that there is nothing too large to be lost - and conversely, no place too small for something to get lost there.” P19
“Experience teaches us nothing if not that all the things parents seek for their children - safety, stability, happiness, opportunity - are neither equitably distributed nor permanent conditions. Even… they too, are susceptible to loss…” p28
“Grief confuses us by spinning us around to face backward, because memories ar wall we have left, but of course it isn’t the past we mourn when someone dies, it’s the future.”
…
This is the fundamental paradox of loss: it never disappears.” P75-76
II - Found
“… a book by the literary critic Philip Fisher about the feeling of wonder - about, among other things, how we respond to rare and remarkable sights, from rainbows to great works of art to a drop of water under a microscope. In it, he notes that at the moment of sudden comprehending something new (“the moment of getting it”), people almost always smile.” P122-123
“My happiness was so enormous that it was like an entire third person standing there beside us.” P129
“…love is the kind of problem that Carl Gauss, the mathematician, would have recognized: you may know with absolute certainty that you have the correct answer yet you still need a long time to work out the details. Once you do, though, the solution will seem, as solutions often do, obvious and elegant, and will render the confusion that came before it borderline unimaginable.” P162
“…the vision of love in literature is often bleak, emphasizing (as Tolstoy did) suffering over gladness, turbulence over contentment, and tragedy over romance. … but even where the vision of love is rosier, the focus is generally on obtaining it, not sustaining it’s: “happily ever after” is the ending, not the story. The implication is that happiness is a static state, with nothing much to be said about it, and that love, once you’ve found it, becomes boring - or, worse, becomes something that isn’t really love at all…
Writers of romantic stories, in other words, generally dwell on loves beginning or on its end but largely neglect its middle - which, per our general lack of interest in happiness, they seek to make as short as possible. But actual lovers do the exact opposite: they seek to make the middle as long as they can; they wish it would go on forever.” P174-175
Goop interview : https://www.youtube.com/live/9F2pLxECExI?feature=share
Likewise, the book is broken up into 3 sections : lost (loss of her father especially), found (love), and “and” the joining of the two. She mentions in the goop interview that she didn’t want to be the focus of her memoir, but instead these two people that marked large moments of her life, and the close timing of her dad’s death about the time she met her love.
I Lost
“In the face of losses both large and small, one of our characteristic reactions is a powerful feeling of disbelief.” P18
“Experience and history both teach us that there is nothing on earth that cannot be lost - no matter it’s value, no matter it’s size (a Boeing 777), no matter how vigilantly we try to keep track of it. …
In the end, this may be why certain losses are so shocking: not because they defy reality but because they reveal it. One of the many ways that loss instructs us is by correcting our sense of scale, showing us the world as it really is: so enormous, complex, and mysterious that there is nothing too large to be lost - and conversely, no place too small for something to get lost there.” P19
“Experience teaches us nothing if not that all the things parents seek for their children - safety, stability, happiness, opportunity - are neither equitably distributed nor permanent conditions. Even… they too, are susceptible to loss…” p28
“Grief confuses us by spinning us around to face backward, because memories ar wall we have left, but of course it isn’t the past we mourn when someone dies, it’s the future.”
…
This is the fundamental paradox of loss: it never disappears.” P75-76
II - Found
“… a book by the literary critic Philip Fisher about the feeling of wonder - about, among other things, how we respond to rare and remarkable sights, from rainbows to great works of art to a drop of water under a microscope. In it, he notes that at the moment of sudden comprehending something new (“the moment of getting it”), people almost always smile.” P122-123
“My happiness was so enormous that it was like an entire third person standing there beside us.” P129
“…love is the kind of problem that Carl Gauss, the mathematician, would have recognized: you may know with absolute certainty that you have the correct answer yet you still need a long time to work out the details. Once you do, though, the solution will seem, as solutions often do, obvious and elegant, and will render the confusion that came before it borderline unimaginable.” P162
“…the vision of love in literature is often bleak, emphasizing (as Tolstoy did) suffering over gladness, turbulence over contentment, and tragedy over romance. … but even where the vision of love is rosier, the focus is generally on obtaining it, not sustaining it’s: “happily ever after” is the ending, not the story. The implication is that happiness is a static state, with nothing much to be said about it, and that love, once you’ve found it, becomes boring - or, worse, becomes something that isn’t really love at all…
Writers of romantic stories, in other words, generally dwell on loves beginning or on its end but largely neglect its middle - which, per our general lack of interest in happiness, they seek to make as short as possible. But actual lovers do the exact opposite: they seek to make the middle as long as they can; they wish it would go on forever.” P174-175
Goop interview : https://www.youtube.com/live/9F2pLxECExI?feature=share
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death of parent