The Book of Lost and Found

by Lucy Foley

Having sisters should have been some sort of initiation, but being the youngest of the three, and therefore picked upon by the others, has merely given him the impression of women as intimidating, quixotic beings.

Yet it transpired that he wasn’t well suited to monogamy.

The most important thing is to continue to do the thing you want to, to keep battling on. That, in my opinion, is the main part of the struggle. Most give up when it seems too difficult.”

“No!” Lady Margaret shakes her head emphatically. “That is not the way to go about it. I have always felt that to be an artist, of the true sort, and therefore the only sort that matters, you must believe in your vocation absolutely. To hope is not enough. You cannot go about as a boy with a hobby on the side and produce work of the highest caliber.”

To truly create, to innovate, you cannot care about the sensibilities you may offend. You cannot mind that some people—your own mother, perhaps—will violently dislike your work. Do you understand?”

Find your own style—and you must be brave, because it takes courage to strike out alone. You must not be afraid of ridicule; indeed, you may want to court it. To be able to elicit a strong reaction of any sort is a powerful thing. God forbid that people should tolerate your work.”

For me, those works were the artistic equivalent of a teenage diary: full of overblown sentiment and melodrama.

“A year,” he said. “That’s not long, not when you’ve lost someone you love. Grand-mère died several years ago—and I haven’t stopped missing her.”

I have a theory, you see, that the most precious memories can be damaged with too much handling, as with all delicate objects.

And there is something else, too. It is that, when I think about that night, it reopens a wound that even after all these years remains raw, hidden just beneath the thin layer of skin that covers it.

“What was it like, when you believed Alice was dead?” He considered this for a long moment before answering, and I wondered if I had gone beyond the pale, but then he said, “I couldn’t believe, after hearing it, that I could go on living. But you do, you know. Even if some part of you does die in that moment.”

The feeling that one has a place in the world, that one is useful in some small way, is not to be underrated.

I think we carry all of our past selves with us, in tight layers. Somewhere within you is that girl, however many other, new selves you may have grown in the years since. She’s what holds you together, at the very center.”