Kathryn Schulz’s Memoir ‘Lost & Found’ Contemplates When Joy and Grief Arrive at the Same Time

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KQED

News, Politics, News Commentary

4.2 • 726 Ratings

🗓️ 20 January 2022

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Writer Kathryn Schulz says her father’s death at 74, surrounded by people he loved, was “not a tragedy.” But it was still cataclysmic. “Popular wisdom will tell you that it comes in stages,” she writes about grief, “denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — and that may be true. But the Paleozoic Era also came in stages … and it lasted 290 million years.” In the midst of despair, Schulz also reveled in the joy of new love, having met her future wife the year before. Forum talks with the New Yorker staff writer about the confluence of major events in her life, the experience of deeply feeling opposite emotions at the same time and her memoir, “Lost & Found.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Landmark College, commemorating 40 years of educating people who learn differently, with programs on campus and online for both students and professionals.
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0:31.1	From KQED.
0:32.1	Thank you. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal.
0:48.2	As a writer, Catherine Schultz inspires a sense of awe in me.
0:52.2	In her new memoir, Lost and Found, she takes the stuff of everyday life, her father's death,
0:57.2	a new love, and makes it both achingly tiny and precise, like a painting etched on a grain
1:02.2	of rice, as well as vast and grand.
1:05.4	As the essayist Marilyn Robinson wrote of the book, our lives deserve and reward the kind
1:10.2	of honest, gentle,
1:11.6	brilliant scrutiny Schultz brings to bear on her own life.
1:14.9	My first impulse was just to have her read passages for the hour, but we'll actually talk,
1:18.5	I promise, about grief, that first kiss, and making the choice to confront the big old world
1:23.7	with amazement rather than terror that's coming up next after this news.
1:32.9	Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal.
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