LOST & FOUND: A MEMOIR by Kathryn Schulz

Structured in three sections titled “Lost,” “Found,” and “And,” this lyrical memoir on the loss of the author’s father and her finding love would seem all too familiar subject matter if it weren’t for the connective tissue Schulz weaves into several a-ha moments. From the mundane moments of losing keys or a wallet to the monumental—memories, a life, the future—there is meaning in what is “found” after loss. She writes, “We are here to keep watch, not to keep.” So to keep living, we must accept that nothing is forever—hence, the “And” section. 

Favorite line(s): Like awe and grief, to which it is closely related, loss has the power to instantly resize us against our surroundings; we are never smaller and the world never larger than when something important goes missing.

SURRENDER: 40 SONGS, ONE STORY by Bono 

I loved this memoir. I loved listening to Bono’s voice as he read from the memoir. A bonus with the audio version is you hear the music that goes along with the 40 different U2 songs Bono uses as launching pads into the “promise, potential and pitfalls of pop music.” U2 is one of the only bands that has lasted decades with the same lineup of band members. Bono chalks this up to agreeing that everyone is paid equally from the beginning. I would add one of the few bands who practice what they preach in their songs. They are world ambassadors—especially Bono, as evident from the last third of the memoir devoted to his philanthropic works, from debt relief for third-world nations to AIDS prevention. Oh, and he’s been married for 40 years to his high school sweetheart—a rock star in career and life.

Favorite line(s): The idea of America. It goes deep. Deeper than Wim Wender’s idea that America has colonized our unconscious through cinema and literature, through TV and music. Deeper than how American rock’ n’ roll shaped a generation before me and everyone after. Only when I look deeper still into the mythology of the United States can I understand my determination to wake up in the dream that is America, the dream of a country where you really have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.” Not for the first time, some words in the gospel dare me to imagine what this country could be in history. Outside it’s America. But for me, it’s inside too. America lives in my imagination. The campaigning senator Obama spoke of there being on red states, no blue states, only the United States, but I’ve always seen two Americas. Not a Republican one and a Democratic one, or even a rich one and a poor one, rather a real one and an imagined one. An operational America whose entrepreneurial capitalism is changing and charging the world and a mythic America that is a poetic idea in which we all have a stake. Ireland is a great country, but it’s not an idea. Great Britain is a great country, but it’s not an idea. America is an idea. A great idea. We can argue that it might be a French idea…and that a French gift, the Statue of Liberty, reminds every new arrival of this, but we also see how the idea of America suggests a fresh start, a new beginning.

MRS. CALIBAN by Rachel Ingalls

Ann Patchett says if you want to write a novel, study the novella Mrs. Caliban. A suburban housewife on the West Coast is dealing with her failing marriage after losing an infant son and suffering a miscarriage when a six-foot-seven dark green sea-creature man shows up in her kitchen one afternoon. The town is on high alert looking for Larry, the creature, after he killed the scientists who tormented him at the Oceanographic Research Lab. Part fairy tale, part fable, Mrs. Caliban, our narrator, could be imagining the story she tells. Is Larry an imaginary lover, friend, and housemate who helps with housework? Or is he real? Ingall’s central concerns about human beings as “marooned creatures” in life and love are never washed in sentimentality. Instead, you’re in the world Ingalls creates eating avocados with Larry. 

Favorite line(s): She drove down in the evenings to the beach. Sometimes by moonlight and sometimes only by starlight, she stared at the line where the water ran over the sand. He never came. She got out of the car and walked up and down the beach, hour after hour. The water ran over the sand, one wave covering another like the knitting of threads, like the begetting of revenges, betrayals, memoires, regrets. And always it made a musical, murmuring sound, a language as definite as speech. But he never came.