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Reviews tagging 'Death of parent'
Lost & Found: Reflections on Grief, Gratitude, and Happiness by Kathryn Schulz
15 reviews
clarabooksit's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
sad
medium-paced
4.25
What an incredibly moving and hopeful portrait of a life before and after a pivotal moment of loss. I love the connections Schulz made, the way she made them, and the particular way she juxtaposed what we have lost or may lose with what we have found or may find. Her writing is so beautiful and carried me along like a gentle current. I loved this.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Grief, Death, Death of parent, and Terminal illness
Minor: Cancer
ashenlar's review against another edition
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
I picked this up after reading the author's personal essay in The New Yorker (When Things Go Missing) and discovering that it was developed into this memoir. Beautiful and clever writing around the ideas of 'loss' and 'finding' illustrated with a range of narratives, from the deeply personal to the universe-spanning.
Maybe not one for people who prefer tight/sparse writing; I enjoy both precise and more verbose writing - as long as it's done well - and I felt that every image, story and reference the author uses to develop the emotional threads are constructive to the overall themes that are centred around the loss of her father and the 'finding' of her partner, and well worth getting drawn into. Definitely would read again
Maybe not one for people who prefer tight/sparse writing; I enjoy both precise and more verbose writing - as long as it's done well - and I felt that every image, story and reference the author uses to develop the emotional threads are constructive to the overall themes that are centred around the loss of her father and the 'finding' of her partner, and well worth getting drawn into. Definitely would read again
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death of parent and Terminal illness
podanotherjessi's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
funny
medium-paced
5.0
This book was brilliant. It was touching and heartwarming. I found myself crying many times throughout the book for so many different reasons. I was touched by the sorrow and grief Schulz expressed, but I also laughed at the stories she told. I was grin and shedding happy tears over her memories. And I found (no pun intended) so, so many moments of connection and relatability in this memoir. Really a fantastic journey through grief and love.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death of parent
stevie_in_the_stacks's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
5.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death of parent and Grief
okiecozyreader's review against another edition
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
mika_ryan's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.75
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death of parent
monalyisha's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.75
Wow! This is a memoir, and a reflection on the meaning of three words (or two words and one letter, if you travel back in time to before the late 1800’s): “lost”, “found”, and “&”. It’s written by a writer who is a lover of poetry; a lover of life; a lover. She muses, at length (and depth) about losing her father, finding the love of her life, and connection.
I now want to read other pieces by her…as well as pieces by her wife, Casey Cep. At one point, Schulz mentions that she’s a secular (atheist) Jew, while “C” (as she calls her) is a devout Lutheran and ordained minister, as well as a writer. With my interest in religion and spirituality, this made me sit up and take note! I’m happy for the literary journey that listening to this lovely audiobook has inspired.
You can feel Mary Oliver’s influence here, and her insistence that “attention is the beginning of devotion” (though I don’t *think* Schulz ever mentions her explicitly, as she does Walt Whitman & Elizabeth Bishop ). If you know me, you know that I love nothing more than a piece of writing that seems to come from an Oliver acolyte! 🍃
I now want to read other pieces by her…as well as pieces by her wife, Casey Cep. At one point, Schulz mentions that she’s a secular (atheist) Jew, while “C” (as she calls her) is a devout Lutheran and ordained minister, as well as a writer. With my interest in religion and spirituality, this made me sit up and take note! I’m happy for the literary journey that listening to this lovely audiobook has inspired.
You can feel Mary Oliver’s influence here, and her insistence that “attention is the beginning of devotion” (though I don’t *think* Schulz ever mentions her explicitly, as she does Walt Whitman & Elizabeth Bishop ). If you know me, you know that I love nothing more than a piece of writing that seems to come from an Oliver acolyte! 🍃
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death of parent
singlespeedahead's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death and Death of parent
mikeybjones's review against another edition
Might pick this up in the future, might not. I purchased this book as a comfort read while dealing with grief myself. I hugely resonated with the first section, but didn’t care to read the rest. I really tried to push through since I’m an avid fan of prose writing, but I disliked that fact that I found myself having to reread sentences/paragraphs more often than not. That being said, however, I believe Kathryn has a beautiful way with words and there were certain phrases I thought about saving for future references, but overall I didn’t feel the need to finish. I do see how it could be perfect for some-this just wasn’t for me at the moment.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death of parent
kelseyleigh_h's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death of parent and Grief