The Lost Chapters: Finding Recovery and Renewal One Book at a Time Audiobook (Free)

Leslie Schwartz’s powerful, skillfully woven memoir of redemption and reading, as told through the set of books she go through as she served a 90 day time jail sentence

In 2014, novelist Leslie Schwartz was sentenced to 90 days in Los Angeles Region Jail for a DUI and battery of the officer. It had been probably the most harrowing and holy connection with her existence.

Carrying out a 414-day relapse into alcohol and drug addiction after greater than a decade clean and sober, Schwartz was sentenced and served her period with only about The Dropped Chapters: Finding Recovery and Renewal One Book at the same time six months’ sobriety. The damage she inflicted that calendar year upon her close friends, her husband, her teenage child, and herself was extremely difficult to fathom. Incarceration might have ruined her entirely, if not for the stories that suffered her while she was behind bars–both the artful tales in the books she go through while there, and, even more immediately, the tales of her fellow inmates. With classics like Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome to contemporary accounts like Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, Schwartz’s reading list can be woven as well as visceral recollections of both her daily humiliations and little triumphs inside the region jail program. Through the stories of others–whether rendered around the web page or whispered inside a jail cell–she learned powerful lessons about how to banish shame, use guilt once and for all, level her grief, and find the lost pleasure and magic of her amazing life.

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