The Book of Lost and Found

by Lucy Foley

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.”

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

No one entered a marriage anticipating its demise.

Then there is the writer, an American, who lives in a flat across the square, but insists he has to remove himself from his apartment in order to work. “The silence is deafening,” he told Alice once. “In there, the work becomes all-important, and therefore impossible. Here, in the café, with the noise, it is merely another part of the scene—small, unexceptional… and hence achievable.”

You know the play Three Sisters?” I nodded; only because it had been on the O level syllabus at school. “Much fun is made of the sister Irina, of her fanciful idea that work will give her life meaning, but I think she is onto something. I have always thought it rather unfair, how disappointed she is by life in the end. Because, if the nature of the work is right, there is great reward to be found. 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.”

“I can tell what it is you want, Kate. You want a love story. But, you see, I’ve given you a love story. It just doesn’t all work out the way one might have written it. You could say ours was not a generation blessed with many happy endings.”