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    The Lost Chapters: Reclaiming My Life, One Book at a Time
    Unavailable
    The Lost Chapters: Reclaiming My Life, One Book at a Time
    Unavailable
    The Lost Chapters: Reclaiming My Life, One Book at a Time
    Audiobook6 hours

    The Lost Chapters: Reclaiming My Life, One Book at a Time

    Written by Leslie Schwartz

    Narrated by Leslie Schwartz

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Leslie Schwartz's powerful, skillfully woven memoir of redemption and reading, as told through the list of books she read as she served a 90 day jail sentence

    In 2014, novelist Leslie Schwartz was sentenced to 90 days in Los Angeles County Jail for a DUI and battery of an officer. It was the most harrowing and holy experience of her life.

    Following a 414-day relapse into alcohol and drug addiction after more than a decade clean and sober, Schwartz was sentenced and served her time with only six months' sobriety. The damage she inflicted that year upon her friends, her husband, her teenage daughter, and herself was nearly impossible to fathom. Incarceration might have ruined her altogether, if not for the stories that sustained her while she was behind bars—both the artful tales in the books she read while there, and, more immediately, the stories of her fellow inmates. With classics like Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome to contemporary accounts like Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken, Schwartz's reading list is woven together with visceral recollections of both her daily humiliations and small triumphs within the county jail system. Through the stories of others—whether rendered on the page or whispered in a jail cell—she learned powerful lessons about how to banish shame, use guilt for good, level her grief, and find the lost joy and magic of her astonishing life.

    Told in vivid, unforgettable prose, The Lost Chapters uncovers the nature of shame, rage, and love, and how instruments of change and redemption come from the unlikeliest of places.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJul 10, 2018
    ISBN9780525627456
    Unavailable
    The Lost Chapters: Reclaiming My Life, One Book at a Time

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    Reviews for The Lost Chapters

    3.5/5

    5 ratings2 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Author Leslie Schwartz loses her sobriety and, after an extended period of drunkenness and drug use, finds herself sentenced to a squalid county jail in Los Angeles for DWI and battery of a police officer (a charge she denies, even though she pled guilty to it). The Lost Chapters tells the story of her thirty-seven day incarceration with female inmates not of her socioeconomic class and of the books that were her lifeline as she waited for the time to pass. Schwartz writes beautifully about the books she that saved her, but there was something about the narrative I didn't quite connect with. I have a hard time putting my finger on it. I think I expected to feel more empathy towards her than I actually did. She just seemed so privileged, with her "movie-star handsome" husband and her cast of loving friends, all standing by her and sending her books during her abbreviated sentence. And she never misses an opportunity to praise herself for her own bravery. So, while I liked this book, and even am likely to pick up some of the books that sustained the author during her stint in jail, I still have some mixed feelings about it.
    • 4/5
      Thoincredible,. I was thoroughly captivated by this raw and honest accounting of z very bad time in this authors life. After more than a decade of sobriety, she has a relapse of drug and alcohol use that lasts for 414 days. She is in author, a wife and mother, not at all representative of the stereotypical user. She blacks out, doesn't remember much from those days, not the hurt the inflicted on her friends, family, something in which she has a hard time forgiving herself. She hits bottom, when she gets a DUI, the officers claiming she assaulted them during her arrest, and she is sentenced to ninth days in a Los Angeles jail.She has plenty of time to come to terms with the harm she has caused to those she loves, and she will learn plenty about the reality of jail. Books become her lifeline, though she only allowed to receive three a week, directly from Amazon, these become her lifeline. She also finds there are few like herself, white, economically stable, the women are mostly poor, different ethnicities, prostitutes and the like. The cruelty of the guards, the constant mind games played, it will not be the women she fears, but those in charge. Those with the power. The relationships she makes in jdil, the stories of their lives that she gets to know, were my favorite parts of the book. The most touching. Also, of course the books she chooses to read. Her story is raw, honest, she is hard on herself, and hard on a system that impridons the poor, the mentally I'll and the already abused. It is hard not to be affected by her story and those of the other women. I have a few other books I am following up with this one, [book:Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, & Criminal in 19th-Century New York|35489149] and American Jail."I have time to think about things now. To think about the way a book feels in my hand, or tastes or sounds. I have never loved so hard and with such fidelity and reciprocation. Books can break your heart, but they never leave you.""It still made me rage, recalling the sbuse of power. But in jail i grasped a bigger truth, a more painful reality. Now I understood that much of the time, especially where addicts and the mentally I'll and the poor are concerned, justice isn't justice, it's personal. This explained why 99% of the people inside are people of color. The realization sliced me open. Sometimes knowledge is like being carved in half."