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

In 2014, novelist Leslie Schwartz was sentenced to 3 months in LA Region Jail for driving under the influence and battery of an officer. It was one of the most harrowing and holy connection with her life.

Following a 414-day relapse into alcohol and drug addiction after more than a decade clean and sober, Schwartz was sentenced and offered her time with only about The Dropped Chapters: Finding Recovery and Renewal One Book at a Time six months’ sobriety. The damage she inflicted that 12 months upon her close friends, her hubby, her teenage little girl, and herself was extremely difficult to fathom. Incarceration may have ruined her altogether, if not really for the tales that suffered her while she was behind bars–both the artful tales in the books she examine while there, and, even 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 definitely woven together with visceral recollections of both her daily humiliations and small triumphs inside the county prison program. Through the stories of others–whether rendered in the web page or whispered inside a jail cell–she learned powerful lessons about how exactly to banish shame, use guilt for good, level her grief, and discover the lost joy and magic of her astonishing life.

Told in brilliant, memorable prose, The Lost Chapters uncovers the nature of shame, rage, and love, and exactly how instruments of change and redemption result from the unlikeliest of places.