Lost Found Kept: A Memoir
“Hoarding has been written about before, but never with such grace."
—Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean
How does a psychologist fail to recognize that her intelligent, sensitive, and book-loving mother has created "the worst hoarder house ever seen?" After making the horrifying discovery that her mother had no water in her house for at least two years, Deborah Derrickson Kossmann begins the otherworldly excavation of a childhood home she hasn't been inside for three decades.
Moving back and forth in time, from this surreal nightmare of an archaeological dig to recollecting her past and long buried family secrets, Kossmann seeks to untangle a web of complicated familial relationships. In her lyrical and unflinching quest, she comes to understand what's been lost, what's been found and what's been kept in both her own and her mother's life.
Read an Excerpt | READER GUIDES
Winner of Trio House Press's inaugural 2023 Aurora Polaris Creative Nonfiction Award
Lost Found Kept: A Memoir
by Deborah Derrickson Kossmann
Trio House Press
January 5, 2025
Paperback | 284 pages
ISBN: 978-1949487336
Print: $24.99
“A deep dive into empathy and fear, rage and frustration as Kossmann, a mental health professional, tackles an unimaginable physical and psychological chore. Hoarding has been written about before, but never with such grace.”
—Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean
“In this unflinching memoir, Deborah Derrickson Kossmann fearlessly excavates her memories and the wreckage of her mother’s home to tell a complex, intimate, troubling story about mothers and daughters, mental illness, and the endurance of love.”
—Carter Sickels, author of The Prettiest Star
“Deborah Derrickson Kossmann has a meticulous eye for the objects of this world, how they can trick some into thinking they’re central to personality, all the while taking on a monstrous life of their own. Lost Found Kept is an immersive, beautifully written, loving outcry of a book about a daughter enlisted with a cleanup, and coming into lightness in no way she could have foreseen.”
—Paul Lisicky, author of Song So Wild and Blue: Life with Joni Mitchell
“This memoir will consume you in ways you can imagine, and a few you wouldn’t expect. With honesty, humor, fierce intelligence, and stunning prose, Deborah Derrickson Kossmann manages to articulate what is difficult for so many of us to grasp—that the child who needs her mother and the damaged woman who must escape her can exist inside the heart at the same time. This is less a story about dysfunction than it is about survival—the innocence we lose, the strength we find, and the love we manage to dig out of the debris that makes a family.”
—Lisa Carey, author of The Stolen Child
Meet the Author
Deborah Derrickson Kossmann’s essays, feature articles and poetry have been published in The New York Times, Nashville Review, Psychotherapy Networker and Solstice Literary Magazine to name a few. She was the winner of the Short Memoir Competition at the Philadelphia First Person Arts Festival and was awarded a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Poetry Fellowship. When she’s not working as a clinical psychologist in private practice outside Philadelphia, PA, she and her husband are devoted servants to Sofia Carmela, a cat with a whole lot of “tortitude.”
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