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

In 2014, award-winning novelist Leslie Schwartz was sentenced to 90 days in county jail for a DUI and battery of an officer of the law. It was the most harrowing and holy experience of her life. Leslie served her time at the tail end of a 414-day relapse into alcohol addiction after more than a decade of sobriety. From August 4, 2013 to September 23, 2014, she remembers almost nothing--a knife incident, some arrests (but not all of them), visits to hospitals and rehab, and the loss of friends and jobs. The official body count, blessedly, was zero, but the damage she inflicted upon her friends, her husband and teenage daughter, and herself was nearly impossible to fathom. Incarceration might have ruined her, if not for the stories that comforted her while she was locked up--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 her daily humiliations faced in the prison 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.

About Leslie Schwartz