Read, then partially listened to, an interview (dated 30th may 2025) in the New York Times recently with Kathryn Schulz, a staff writer with The New Yorker and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize . She’s interviewed by Ezra Klein about her 2022 book, ‘Lost & Found’.
Eighteen months before Kathryn Schulz’s beloved father died, she met the woman she would marry. In Lost & Found, she weaves the stories of those relationships into a brilliant exploration of how all our lives are shaped by loss and discovery-from the maddening disappearance of everyday objects to the sweeping devastations of war, pandemic, and natural disaster; from finding new planets to falling in love.
Three very different American families form the heart of Lost & Found: the one that made Schulz’s father, a charming, brilliant, absentminded Jewish refugee; the one that made her partner, an equally brilliant farmer’s daughter and devout Christian; and the one she herself makes through marriage. But Schulz is also attentive to other, more universal kinds of conjunction: how private happiness can coexist with global catastrophe, how we get irritated with those we adore, how love and loss are themselves unavoidably inseparable. The resulting book is part memoir, part guidebook to living in a world that is simultaneously full of wonder and joy and wretchedness and suffering-a world that always demands both our gratitude and our grief.
There are many memorable moments within this interview. Kathryn Schulz is a gifted conversationalist (though not to the same degree as her father, apparently, who ‘could talk me under the table’), and Klein has prepared his questions well. The interview’s behind a paywall I assume, but let me quote just one question and response (and recommend you seek out Kathryn’s work online):
Is there an experience that comes to mind for you recently, where you were looking at something small and you saw something big in it — or big and you saw something small in it?
Sure. I’m going to tell a story that sounds like it can’t possibly be true, and I swear it is.
What you need to know by way of context for this story is that a year or so ago, my partner and I bought the house across the street from the farm where she was born and raised, and where her parents still live. We’ve been gradually renovating it ever since then and were incredibly excited to move in and to be near family and, frankly, near more child care.
We finally move in, and I’m reveling in this beautiful new home as we settle in. Then — this is only a week ago — my daughter, who’s now 3½ — we have these beautiful fields outside of our house, and she wanders off into the field and returns with a stalk of wheat and says: Look, Mama. So I’m thinking: Oh, she found a stalk of wheat — fun! Children pick up everything, right? Clovers, coins, anything muddy, tarantulas — whatever they can find.
So she hands me this stalk of wheat, and I’m thinking: Oh, how sweet, she gets to live in this beautiful setting where the outdoors is full of so many wonderful little things for her to study. Then she looks at me very seriously and says: Mama, we should use this wheat to make bread for people who don’t have any.
It’s just one of those moments as a parent, where, on the one hand, you’re just so in love with your child. You think: Who made this remarkable mind?
I’m sitting there thinking she found a pretty flower or something, and there she is apparently thinking about the poor and privation and need. So right away my sense of the scale of what we were talking about just wildly shifted.
But also, to be honest, right alongside feeling overwhelming awe for her, I felt so morally indicted. I am literally in the middle of reveling in my pretty new kitchen, and then suddenly, I’m confronted with real hunger in the world, and I’m thinking: Why do I have this beautiful backsplash? What have I done here? My 3-year-old has more moral clarity than I do about how we should spend our money and our time and what actually matters in life.
So, yes, in a wonderful way, I feel like my world is full of discoveries that seem small and blossom out into the enormous. Or seem enormous and then have some kind of bearing on small, practical things, like how to be a family and how to raise children. It’s often incredibly humbling. And sometimes it’s very funny, and sometimes it’s very moving. In that case, it was all the above.
The book’s available at Readings Bookshop in Melbourne, costs $34.99.