As a rule, I get wary of travel or epiphany books, particularly written by overrepresented groups: white, male, and of above-average means. The sudden revelations about life and existence, and meaning are never really groundbreaking or moving, but usually narrow and cliché, without a sense of scale in experience or diversity of humanity. This is why you’ll never read such a work by me; I don’t see how I’d add anything to the discourse.
I say all this to tell you, the reader, that Dustin Grinnell’s Lost & Found: Reflections on Travel, Career, Love and Family is not one of these trite works. I say it because it very, very easily could have been exactly that, but it avoids doing so and actually has some remarkable things to say about how we grow, evolve, and learn as we march through life, not really understanding why much of the time. This is a work of literature that succeeds not because it’s necessarily new or innovative in concept, but because it dares to be honest.
The components that work to such an exceptional degree in this work are somewhat inherent in the chronological structure. When Grinnell begins his collection of essays, we can see the aforementioned issues with these sorts of texts out front: he references names like Kierkegaard and describes travel to exotic places in search of enlightenment and meaning. And yet, the difference in this particular work is evident from the beginning. In the first chapter, “A Sudden Stab of Murky Suspicion,” Grinnell concludes his opening vignette by describing refusing to enter a building in Tanzania on a tour due to feeling an imprecise sense of danger. What he does not do is attempt to justify it; instead, he admits freely to his embarrassment and doubt at cutting the tour short and returning to his hostel. It gives the reader the first impression of someone who, perhaps, has the introspective ability to acknowledge their own misgivings as unfounded. In other words, we are free to trust our narrator because he doesn’t present himself as infallible or a font of previously unfound knowledge and understanding.
Therefore, when Grinnell begins describing his exploration of China, the reader can feel comfortable that he sees himself as the inexperienced one, the stranger, and does not fall into the trap of unearned superiority simply due to being a Westerner. Moreover, these sections aren’t about the exotic nature of China, a place where I myself lived for several years, but about a much more human quality: relationships. The beauty of the people is what Grinnell focuses on, and he highlights individuals in depth and detail that fully render them to the reader. This persists throughout the essays as the book progresses. Every small character feels total in their humanity, and that thread is what begins to elevate the book.
These moments are somewhat disrupted by the continuous references to literary and philosophical minds and their works, which wore on me. I don’t feel they are misplaced or unnecessary; their inclusion is always in the correct place and flow of Grinnell’s thought, but it does offer a certain sense of pompousness for me as a reader that, because I enjoy all of the other work, I find irritating. For others, this may wash over you. I may simply be overly sensitive to such insertions. However, I would make the case that they offend me because I want to submerge myself in the prose and vulnerability of the rest of the work and where it dares to go.
To dare in this particular medium is to avoid commercialisation. If you’re writing one of these collections as a way to get sold in airport bookshops, as a companion to your self-help TikTok videos, or to be invited onto Oprah, you lead everything towards some revelation wherein the author has “solved” some amorphous problem about existence and you, the audience, can follow in their footsteps towards enlightenment. Grinnell doesn’t do that, and it’s why this work is so excellent. We are made to wade through the darkness and the flaws he openly attempts to unravel and hold up to the light, not for the reader, but for himself.
If you doubt me, consider where the series of stories concludes: in the dull and menial world of office politics. Our hero doesn’t disappear into the forest or become a health guru mastering an alternative lifestyle; he struggles with chronic back pain and the abhorrent tedium of a nine-to-five. Perhaps I find these particular chapters more powerful because Dustin is a friend and former college rugby teammate, and so I recall past conversations about writing and being a professional writer, where we both lamented one cannot simply choose to take that on as a career and be able to exist in today’s society. I, at least, was able to fall back on teaching, a profession I enjoy most of the time. Grinnell had to take his skillset to the corporate world and try to thrive there. In a way, one can only understand if they have toiled in such a place, he finds a way to persevere without railing futilely against the system.
And it’s the system, by which I willfully encapsulate any features of the modern world, that force people to conform to the expectations of capitalism and progress, that feels as though it drags humanity out of Grinnell. The sections on death and the fear of it that surely all humans must have were the most poignant for me, but the similarity across the whole work is the desire for life to have meaning. Lost & Found doesn’t claim to have answers for anyone; it expresses no universal truths, it’s personal and, at times, painful. This is what elevates it—the ultimate message that you can simply put one foot in front of another, ticking the boxes along the way towards some concept of success; or you can take the time to ponder, to hurt, to love, to doubt, and then maybe find for yourself the reason to live your one life for you as much as possible.
