Welcome to Litsy!

This thoughtful, erudite memoir has two parts: the grief she felt in losing her beloved father, and falling in love with her future wife. Schultz shares vulnerable, personal moments from both experiences, but then goes a step further to explore the more universal vicissitudes of love and grief. A bit academic even, but so insightful. Since these two experiences overlapped, she discusses finding a greater appreciation in the dualities of life.

In this memoir writes about the father she lost and the love she found. I was especially interested in the first part, but for me that turned out disappointing. It read almost like a scientific article and I couldn‘t relate to it. I did enjoy the second part though, which makes the book a so-so I guess.

#WeeklyForecast 39/24

I am reading and thoroughly enjoying The Frozen River. Next will be Brief Lives which I didn‘t get to last week. Hopefully there‘ll be time to start the tagged one as well.

Personal essays on losing her father and finding her partner. Although the first part of the book is on loss and grief, it‘s really a happy book about a happy childhood and loving relationships. Shulz is an elegant nonfiction writer who writes for the New Yorker magazine.

My semi-appropriate hurricane reading…

To be clear, I‘m still trying to fly home to my hurricane struck house…. 🙁

Alyisha, I just received the most gorgeous, decadent package from you and Moxie Crimefighter! Thank you so much for all the gifts! I feel very spoiled and I can‘t wait to dive into this beautiful book and my new tea! And thank you for another amazing year of #auldlangspine

P.S. Cedric approves, and says bunnies smell weird and amazing and he‘d like to meet one someday!

@IndoorDame Moxie hath spoken!

You‘ve won the #AuldLangSpine giveaway. Congrats! 🥳 I think you were leaning towards the tagged book. Does your choice still stand?

Send me an email over at monalitsy@gmail.com with your mailing address and I‘ll send you a little package in the next week or two.

Thanks for participating!

“…what serves us best, in the face of inexorable loss, is not our grief or our acquiescence but our attention.”

“I, too, feel that way: that my days are exceptional even when they are ordinary, that existence does not need to show us any of its more famous or spectacular wonders to fill us with amazement. We live remarkable lives because life itself is remarkable, a fact that is impossible not to notice if only suffering leaves us alone for long enough.”

“What an astonishing thing it is to find someone. Loss may alter our sense of scale, reminding us that the world is overwhelmingly large while we are incredibly tiny. But finding does the same; the only difference is that it makes us marvel rather than despair.”

“Other than the internet, is there any richer source of potential embarrassment than a pack-rat parent and a childhood home?”

😂

“…there is a limit to how close you can get to people who do not care about the same questions you do, not through any failure on their part but simply because their minds orient along different meridians than yours. Conversely, the wonderful lesson I learned from falling in love with C. is that if you do care about the same questions, it doesn‘t necessarily matter if you arrive at the same answers.”

I can‘t get over how gorgeous this cover is, with its swoopy ampersand of stars against that dark blue. And the writing is equally gorgeous: from sentences to pacing—and the overall construction of the book—it‘s impeccable. Schulz reflects on losing her father and finding her partner, offering a beautiful meditation on grief and loss, love and finding, and how both are inextricably linked. #AuldLangSpine

“Amazement, gratitude, wonder, awe: the feelings inspired in us by serendipitous finds are the same ones inspired in us by the cosmos as a whole, and for the same reason—because life gave us something splendid that we did not expect, did not ask for, and did not in any particular way deserve.”

#AuldLangSpine

“…at its core, finding something always resembles that moment, dear to the heart of six-year-olds, of spotting a penny on the ground: you are the one standing there looking when the world shifts just so and some bright glimmer—a knickknack at the junk shop, the first shining edge of a brilliant idea, the woman you will marry—catches your eye.”

So much beautiful writing in this book!

#AuldLangSpine

The January #BookSpin fates have selected one #AuldLangSpine pick and one book from my Kindle TBR. And it‘s handy that I already have Lost & Found cued up from the library. 😁 Looks like it‘s going to be a good reading month!

First library hold is in for #AuldLangSpine2024! I‘ll save it until Monday, but it‘s downloaded and ready to go! 🎉🥂

Reading with my sister's dog. She's very warm!

This ... can leave us feeling two different ways. One of them, akin to the feeling of losing something, is that the universe is dauntingly large and we are terrifyingly insignificant. The other, akin to the feeling of finding, is that the universe is dauntingly large and yet here we are, unimaginably unlikely and therefore precious beyond measure.

IRL bookclub tomorrow night 🤓Gorgeous prose but for a rather slim book it‘s VERY WORDY 😉 I found this book very intimate and personal. Grief affects everyone differently but I can imagine how truthful this book will be for many. I enjoyed the audio read by the author.

Stars and quiet filled the sky. All around us, the universe was expanding, not from something, not into anything, all on its own, changing the scale of space, stretching the boundaries of existence. Gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and the weak, all the known and unknown forces were exerting themselves on the cosmos.

My experience of grief in the last 16 months has been messy, unpredictable and life has stripped by back to its dirtiest, rawest form. This prose here is full of flowers, blissfully idyllic, meandering down country lanes filled with butterflies which made it unrelatable.

Unfortunately the only take away for me was how the alphabet once included &.

Your mileage is going to vary here relating to your own grief experience.

What a wonderful event #AuldLangSpine was. I had a blast and managed to read 3 books from @jenniferw88 recommended list. I've stacked many more to continue with over the year.
Thank you so much for your brilliant hosting and matching skills @monalyisha
I would love to read the tagged. It's got great reviews 😊

Thank you for everything you do for #AuldLangSpine, Alyisha —the concept, the coordination, the matching and now this giveaway! Tagged is the book I would love to receive and read in 2023 because it came onto my radar (and onto my TBR) after seeing your review of it. 🙂
#AuldLangSpineGiveaway

"... he loved to bend a phrase right up to the breaking point before letting it spring back into place, reverberating wildly."

Getting set for #AuldLangSpine 🥂🎉 reading with @Chelsea.Poole

These are the ones my library offered physical copies of. I also have one physical book I'll be picking up from another library next week (tagged), and lots available for e-reading.

@monalyisha

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. 👇🏻

Called a memoir, but much, much more. Schulz explores her father‘s death, meeting her wife, and the very concepts of losing and finding and what those things mean in our lives. This is thoughtful and interesting and really lovely.

There are 3 essays in this book. The 1st is Lost & that is the one I was most struck by. The author writes of her father-his life, his illness & his passing. It is a glorious piece of work, one that I immediately wanted to share with my friend whose sister passed away. Of the last 3 books I read about a parent dying, this one hit all the key points in such an elegant way. I appreciate her effort in expressing the inexpressible.

A three part memoir. I really marveled at the Lost segment. After abruptly losing my mom in 2012, I began searching for my great grandfather‘s lost paintings. That said, much of the Lost segment resonated with me. I wished I had written many of its marvelous and insightful sentences. I enjoyed Found - the telling of her finding and growing the relationship with her (eventual) wife. I confess to skimming the third section: AND.

An amazing memoir, likely one of the most memorable books of the year. A heartbreaking and perfect examination of the death of Schulz's father and it‘s impact on her life (Lost), followed by being Found (part 2) by the love of her life, fellow author Casey Cep (Furious Hours). The final section “&” —a mingling of the worst and best times of Schulz‘s life. This is full of the stuff of life: joy and grief, death and love, the mundane and profound.

This was a lovely book. I will never look at the simple little ampersand the same way again. Very touching.👩‍❤️‍👩

Really enjoyed this. Heard rather than read this book. It was such a good meditation on love and death

We wandered through a local contemporary art museum, which, because its exhibitions included towering stone megaliths and crumpled cars and piles of shattered glass, I jokingly described as the museum of fear-based art. I see your point, C said, looking up at a 9-foot tall spider by Louise Bourgeois.
(Internet photo)

A thoughtful memoir, unusual in the way its main focus is the author‘s emotional life… the emotions we all experience: grief, love, fear, joy, dread and wonder. The prose is gorgeous and precise, clear-eyed yet tender, whether writing about the death of her beloved father, Schulz‘s marriage to her wife, or musing more generally on the importance of connections. I loved the #audiobook which is narrated by the author. #LGBTQ

Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience urging us to make better use of our finite days.

The cumulative effect of these various debilities was to make me feel tremendously old. Or maybe that‘s backwards. Maybe I incurred all those debilities because I already felt old. Grief of any kind will age you, partly from exhaustion, but chiefly from the confrontation with mortality.

Love is so often written about analogically—my love is like a red, red rose, etc—yet the point of the beloved, the whole reason you are in love with her, is that she is like no one else on earth.

Absolutely loved this #audiobook narrated by the author that‘s partially a memoir about the death of the author‘s father and her falling in love with her partner. But, it‘s also about meteorites and etymology and losing your keys and so much more. 💕