Lost and Found: One Woman's Story of Losing Her Money and Finding Her Life [Paperback]

Geneen Roth (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 3, 2012

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Women Food and God maps a path to meeting one of our greatest challenges-how we deal with money.

When Geneen Roth and her husband lost their life savings in the Bernard Madoff debacle, Roth joined the millions of Americans dealing with financial turbulence, uncertainty, and abrupt reversals in their expectations. The resulting shock was the catalyst for her to explore how women's habits and behaviors around money-as with food-can lead to exactly the situations they most want to avoid. Roth identified her own unconscious choices: binge shopping followed by periods of budgetary self-deprivation, "treating" herself in ways that ultimately failed to sustain, and using money as a substitute for love, among others. As she examined the deep sources of these habits, she faced the hard truth about where her "self-protective" financial decisions had led. With irreverent humor and hard-won wisdom, she offers provocative and radical strategies for transforming how we feel and behave about the resources that should, and can, sustain and support our lives.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Geneen Roth is a writer and a teacher who has gained international prominence through her work in the field of eating disorders. She is the founder of the Breaking Free workshops, which she has conducted nationwide since 1979. She is also the author of Feeding the Hungry Heart, Breaking Free from Compulsive Eating, and When Food Is Love. A frequent guest on television and radio programs, she has written for and been featured in Tie, Ms., New Woman, Family Circle, and Cosmopolitan. Her poetry and short stories have been published in numerous anthologies. Born in New York City, she now lives in northern California.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Plume; Reprint edition (April 3, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0452297761
• ISBN-13: 978-0452297760
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #473,136 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Geneen Roth is the author of the bestseller, When Food is Love and seven other books. She has conducted workshops for over thirty years and has lead retreats for the past ten.

Roth is a frequent contributor to many publications including Salon.com, Huffington Post and Good Housekeeping and has appeared on numerous national shows from Oprah, 20/20, Good Morning America, and The View, to Primetime Live and NPR's Talk of the Nation.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

68 of 71 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Madoff, Money, and Deliberate Ignorance - a Searing Look at a Lost a Lost Savings and Found Outlook March 24, 2011

By Rachel Kramer Bussel VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

I'm a longtime Geneen Roth fan, and think this might be her best work yet, or at the very least, right up there, as she untangles the ways we think about money and food and what they represent. She starts with her own major loss--her and her husband's life savings of one million dollars, which had been invested with Bernie Madoff. But what's really at the heart of this book is why and how she came to invest with him and the assumptions she'd made about money--that caring about it was for "other people" (read: men) and that those who felt moved to act for social change "shouldn't" care about money.

I found so many connections to what she wrote about money and my own relationship...with dating and relationships. It was almost eerie, and I think anyone who's felt that they should look to an authority figure who "knows better," whether about money or another topic, who has purposefully avoided looking at the hard things, thinking they'd either go away or magically take care of themselves, who's used money to soothe themselves, will get something out of this book.

At first, especially if you're someone who lives paycheck to paycheck, the idea that someone with such a nest egg could feel worried about money seems a bit audacious, over-the-top, but it's a very clear line from those who are thin but feel fat, and what Roth does best here is describe that feeling, and how the extreme nature of what happened with her savings forced her to reckon with her previous thinking. The stories about her father's treatment of money (tossing it onto the floor and making everyone else literally scramble on the ground to pick it up) are eerie and disturbing, but Roth never asks us to feel sorry for her. She isn't looking at what made Madoff do what he did but rather how her own attitude fosters her ignorance and allowed her to continue to put money into a category outside of her own mind. This is a powerful book that I will certainly be rereading, and Roth masterfully looks deep inside as well as outside, amongst her peers who lost money to Madoff and their varying reactions as well as in a broader sense, to what money does and doesn't signify in our culture.

53 of 56 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Geneen's Loss Is Our Gain March 23, 2011

By Roxxie25

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Wow, do I hope as many people read this book as did Women Food and God. Geneen has a rare gift for placing everyday suffering and compulsion in a much broader context of spirituality and redemption, and boy did she hit the jackpot of suffering when she lost her life's savings to Bernie Madoff. Anybody who has ever defined themselves and their place in the world by how much or how little money they have should read this book (not to mention it is an absolute must-read for all compulsive shoppers !) I have been reading Geenen's books for over 20 years, and I believe this is her best work yet. One word of warning - the subject matter of this book is at times hilarious but also very upsetting. Of course, many readers will know the post-script that, after the Madoff scandal, Geneen went on to publish her most successful book yet, Women, Food, and God, and we know that Geneen will be fine. Many Madoff victims, whose stories are also told in these pages, like the working single mother who sacrificed years of reading to her daughter before bed at night only to end up with nothing to show for it, are not so fortunate. Geneen too is painfully aware of this, and perhaps her greatest gift is that she does not sugar-coat or condescend.

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Bouncing Back from Madoff March 26, 2011

By John Harper

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Yesterday, on the flight from Detroit to San Francisco, I read Geneen Roth's new book - Lost and Found - Unexpected Revelations About Food and Money. The book is an eye-opening exploration of how the past and our unconscious attitudes about money can wreak havoc in our lives.

Geneen pulls no punches in the book. From "grovelling for dollars" to "Madoff rage" to the "specter of homelessness," Lost and Found is a candid revelation about what Geneen learned by losing her life's savings in Bernie Madoff's Ponzi Scheme. The book gives us insight into Geneen Roth's open-ended inquiry into her relationship with money, her unconscious attitudes toward money, her life habits around money, and how she has begun to free herself from it all through awareness & inquiry.

It takes a lot of courage to reveal so many personal and intimate details as Geneen has in her book. The gift of it for the reader is that we can connect with her and her experience in a real way. Lost and Found isn't a dispassionate treatise on the effects and insights of falling victim to one of the greatest con men of all time, nor is it a tale of "woe is me." Lost and Found is more a journey of revelation from a person responding to a "wake up call" from reality.

We are fortunate to have a person like Geneen Roth who can show us the beauty and power of bringing awareness and inquiry into all of our life.