A searchingly intelligent memoir and psychological meditation.
A Pulitzer Prize–winning New Yorkerstaff writer muses on the interconnectedness of loss and gain.
Losing her father made Schulz feel all too keenly how a once “familiar world [could suddenly] feel alien and inaccessible.” But in the year before he died, the author also met the woman whose presence would counterbalance her father’s devastating absence. In this memoir, Schulz transforms this extraordinary coincidence of major life events—death and falling in love—into an extended, philosophically edged reflection on the meaning of losing and its opposite, finding. Starting with the former, Schulz examines etymology. “The verb ‘to lose’ has its taproot sunk in sorrow,” she writes, but only around the 14th and 15th centuries did the word begin to expand in meaning to encompass “the circle of what we can lose.” Drawing on such disparate topics as the sudden disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in 2014 and the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, Schulz observes that losses are devastating to us not just because “they defy reality but because they reveal it” in all its ephemeral fragility. In the second section, the tone lightens considerably as the author contrasts loss with two forms of finding: recovery, which “reverses the impact of loss,” and discovery, which “changesour world.” Her voice aglow with wonderment, Schulz then tells the story of how she met fellow writer C. A friend had introduced them via email, but the day they met, the author’s brain began the “life-altering organization” that eventually led to Schulz's offering C. her dead father’s wedding ring as a symbol of moving forward in love rather than remaining paralyzed for fear of future loss. Elegant and thought-provoking, Schulz’s book is as much a celebration of the circle of life as it is an elegant reminder to all that “we are here to keep watch, not to keep.”
A searchingly intelligent memoir and psychological meditation.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-525-51246-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
An intimate, stirring chronicle.
A daughter’s memories.
Booker Prize–winning Indian novelist Roy recounts a life of poverty and upheaval, defiance and triumph in an emotionally raw memoir, centered on her complicated relationship with her mother. Mary Roy, who raised her two children alone after divorcing her ne’er-do-well husband, was a volatile, willful woman, angry and abusive. In a patriarchal society that oppressed women socially, economically, and legally, she fought to make a life for herself and her family, working tirelessly to become “the owner, headmistress, and wild spirit” of an astoundingly successful school. The schoolchildren respectfully called her Mrs. Roy, and so did Arundhati and her brother. To escape her mother’s demands and tantrums, Arundhati, at age 18, decided to move permanently to Delhi, where she was studying architecture. After a brief marriage to a fellow student, she embarked on a long relationship with a filmmaker, which ignited her career as a writer: screenplays, essays, and at last the novel she titled The God of Small Things. The book became a sensation, earning her money and fame, as well as notoriety: She faced charges of “obscenity and corrupting public morality.” Arundhati sets her life in the context of India’s roiling politics, of which she became an outspoken critic. For many years, she writes, “I wandered through forests and river valleys, villages and border towns, to try to better understand my country. As I traveled, I wrote. That was the beginning of my restless, unruly life as a seditious, traitor-warrior.” Throughout, Mrs. Roy loomed large in her daughter’s life, and her death, in 2022, left the author overcome with grief. “I had grown into the peculiar shape that I am to accommodate her.” Without her, “I didn’t make sense to myself anymore.” Her candid memoir revives both an extraordinary woman and the tangled complexities of filial love.
An intimate, stirring chronicle.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781668094716
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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PERSPECTIVES
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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