Lost & Found: A Memoir

“Just as every grief narrative is a reckoning with loss, every love story is a chronicle of finding,” writes Pulitzer Prize winner Schulz (Being Wrong) in this stunning memoir. As Schulz recounts, she contended with the pain and ecstasy of both narratives colliding when she fell in love with her future wife, C., 18 months before Schulz’s father died. She explores the grief of loss and joy of finding through penetrating reflections on the life of her father, a deep thinker with an endless appetite for the world; an “intimate study of [her] beloved” wife; and philosophical forays into literature, poetry, and art. She ruminates on the “intrinsic pleasure of discovery” in quest narratives, is reminded how “the entire plan of the universe consists of losing” when C. reads her Whitman’s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, and thinks of her father’s memorial service, one of the “greatest parties I ever attended,” when remembering C. S. Lewis’s quote that “we all have... many bad spots in our best times, many good ones in our worst.” By the end of these exquisite existential wanderings, Schulz comes to a quiet truce with her finding that “life, too, goes by contraries... by turns crushing and restorative... comic and uplifting.” Schulz’s canny observations are a treasure. (Jan.)