Synopses & Reviews
Last year Geneen Roth's book Women Food and God inspired women across the country to take a new look at their relationship with food. Oprah featured Geneen as a guest on two shows and the book was on The New York Times bestseller list for thirty five weeks. The book was a success story but it came on the heels of a much darker story: Geneen and her husband lost their life savings and joined thousands of Americans facing financial disaster.
Now Roth is back with a new book for our financially-challenged times that shows how she and her readers can break free from old patterns and chart a full life based on principles that better reflect our true values. Lost and Found: Unexpected Revelations About Food and Money is a memoir about financial free-fall and the experience of recovering from a major money disaster. It is an intimate and thought-provoking exploration of all the many meanings money has in our lives -- largely unconscious and powerful enough to lead to questionable decisions and conflicted emotions. Roth, no financial expert by her own admission, had sought out advice over the years from a variety of recommended experts. The truth: her eyes glazed over at most of what the experts told her and she was rarely able to sustain their advice or even understand its implications. She drifted along until disaster hit then realized the time had come for her to grapple with how the conversation about money made her feel and act -- contracted, defensive, defeated -- if she was ever going to be able to get the better of her money demons.
With penetrating insight and irreverent humor, Roth traces her own money compulsions from subtle beginnings to unexpected ends. She teaches personal examination, showing readers how to use their patterns of spending to discover the real fulfillment they long for and purchases never fully satisfy. Packed with revelations, Lost and Found shows that how we eat and how we spend -- dieting and budgeting and bingeing and splurging, for instance -- have their roots in similar age-old compulsions and unconscious beliefs we hold about ourselves. Using the tools she has used for decades in her work with food, she charts a new way to look at the money issues in our lives including some spending exercises she used with her retreat students which help break the spell of misplaced anxieties and yearnings.
As Roth observes, "Unless we examine our relationships to money, chances are that we are acting out a world of insufficiency and greed in our daily financial exchanges. And since our feelings and beliefs always manifest in our behaviors and since we can't separate one part of ourselves from the other parts, we can't help but carry this greed and deprivation, this shame and fear to every relationship we have and to everything we do."
Review
"A compelling, gorgeously written, searing, funny, and utterly inspiring book. You won't be able to put Lost and Found down and when you've finished it, your relationship with money will never be the same." Lynne Twist, author of The Soul of Money
Review
"Lost and Found offers a wake-up call on a topic that causes so much psychological and spiritual pain and stress. Geneen Roth shows us how awareness of our money behavior can liberate our wisdom, happiness, and well-being. Read it, and you'll also understand how to make wiser money decisions." Spencer Sherman, MBA, CFP, author of The Cure for Money Madness
Review
"Dazzling insights and eloquent wisdom from one of the truly sophisticated minds of our time." David Krueger, MD, author of The Secret Language of Money
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
Unabridged, 5 CDs, 6 hours Read by the author
The #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Women Food and God explores how emotional issues with money mirror those with food and dieting.
About the Author
Geneen Roth is the author of the bestsellers Women, Food and God and When Food is Love and seven other books. She has conducted workshops and retreats for the past thirty years that help attendees understand their compulsive and conflicted behaviors with food and money, as well as other deeply personal and spiritual issues. 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, The View, Primetime Live and NPR's Talk of the Nation.