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Praise for Lost Found Kept

“In dealing with the terrifying reality of her mother’s obsessive hoarding, Deborah Derrickson Kossmann is a writer of uncommon courage and a daughter of uncommon compassion. The reader takes 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

“Dr. Deborah Kossmann’s warm, touching, page turner is a gold mine of psychological exploration, insight and understanding of her family dynamics, as well as a fascinating journey through her own transformational growth. Highly recommended for those who enjoy compelling memoir and are interested in gaining insight into both the murky depths of the sources and impact of hoarding on a family and the ways in which we can all better understand our origins and ourselves.”

—Julia L. Mayer and Barry J. Jacobs, co-authors of AARP Meditations for Caregivers and AARP Love and Meaning After 50

“Deborah Derrickson Kossmann opens the back door to her childhood home for the first time in 29 years to discover the horrific extent of her mother's hoarding. In clear, lyrical prose and in chapters that swing easily between past and present, this riveting tale portrays with honesty and compassion Kossmann's struggles to release herself from her chaotic past as she is uncovering the truth about her mother's hidden condition.”

—Caroline Patterson, author of The Stone Sister 

“What a privilege to be an early reader of Deborah Derrickson Kossmann’s debut memoir Lost Found Kept, a tale of a mother’s life as a hoarder and a daughter’s struggle to understand both her mother’s life and her own. In beautiful and insightful prose, Kossmann dives deeply into the wreck of her family’s past to uncover secrets of abuse, mental illness, and trauma. Kossmann moves smoothly from present to past to create the fragile life of a girl-child and how that fragility affects the woman she will become. This is a poignant, empathetic, and necessary memoir.”

—Sandell Morse, author of The Spiral Shell: A French Village Reveals Its Secrets of Jewish Resistance in World War II  

“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

“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

EVENTS

January 5, 2025 | Lost Found Kept: A Memoir published by Trio House Press

For events and interviews, please contact Mary Bisbee-Beek.