A New Yorker staff writer narrates the story of her father's death and her subsequent bereavement alongside the tale of falling in love, around the same time, with the woman who would become her wife, exploring the dual forces of loss and discovery in shaping a life.
Schulz’s mind flows beautifully on the page. While this book is classified as a memoir, it can also be read as a sweeping set of essays. Schulz’s prose is lucid and intentional, yet unexpected and compassionate. She doesn’t race to make her point and that expansive pace is what makes this book such a pleasure. Hers is a nimble and profoundly humane mind, capable of carrying the various threads of her thinking onward without losing the integrity of the fabric she’s creating ... Schulz uses her life’s stories as a launching point for an omnivore’s exploration of science, space, history, art, and writing in order to elaborate her points. Rather than dwell on her personal life, weighing the reader down with the operatic twists of some memoirs, Schulz treads lightly on the drama of her days. She’s not writing for her own personal catharsis ... While this memoir is no quest for healing or a chronicle of family secrets, there is great weight in Schulz’s most personal moments. Being privy to her budding romance is a window into intense tenderness and deep gratitude ... Where other memoirs concentrate on facts and family history, Schulz finds a way to subvert the genre, taking it to philosophical levels while maintaining a grounded intimacy.
More than any book in recent memory, Lost & Found evokes the process of falling in love with a lush expansiveness and alertness to detail, a perfect ballet of confession and philosophy. Schulz plaits her personal narrative with canonical explorations, from Plato to Dante to Elizabeth Bishop. Hers is a generous, conversational voice; the effect is like an intoxicating Oxbridge tutorial. This richly discursive style conjures a marriage of minds, between an atheist Jewish sophisticate and a rural-centric, theologically attuned Christian ... Lost & Found concludes on a jubilant note, an unabashed ode to joy.
Eloquent ... While Schulz writes with tenderness and honesty about love, her sharpest and most moving passages are about loss ... Schulz lost her father, but by the end of Lost & Found, we understand that while his absence is devastating, shocking and total, she will continue to find gifts he left for her. He’s still there in her verve and curiosity, in her cleareyed ability not just to write about love, but to love.
