INTERVIEW: Deborah Derrickson Kossmann, Author of Lost Found Kept: A Memoir

Interviewed by Leslie Lindsay

Having recently cleared my basement of the detritus of a happy twenty plus years of marriage, plus raising children, and setting the stage for the empty nest, I was eager to dive into Deborah Derrickson Kossmann’s Lost Found Kept: A Memoir (Trio House Press, 2025).

This is not that book. Lost Found Kept is the antithesis of the empty nest. It’s a fully feathered, highly dysfunctional one in which everything is there, but the people. The 1960’s tri-level home is filled with 15 years of garbage, human waste, water-logged newspapers and books, liquifying chicken sandwiches, and more. Over the course of six weeks and the manpower of the author and her husband, Marc, (and a few guest helpers), the house is painstakingly emptied, flipped, and restored. With her psychologist’s empathy and clinical approach, Derrickson Kossmann provides a glimpse into her childhood, her mother’s childhood, a troubling series of losses, while offering a sense of dignity and compassion.

At its heart, Lost Found Kept is an intimate mother-daughter memoir about excavation and understanding, but what is truly at the core of this story is loss—loss of control, loss of material possessions, and loss of loved ones.

As a former psychiatric RN and motherless daughter of a severely mentally ill woman, I understand the challenges and responsibilities of a daughter-mother surrogate. As someone innately intrigued by the structure and container of homes, I recognize how a house is not just a house, but a vessel of memories, hopes, desires, and often, love.

I am excited and honored to talk with Deb about this deeply personal and intimate memoir. Please join us as we discuss the genesis of the book, structure, writing style, the process of debriding the house, hoarding behavior, loss, grief, and healing.

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Leslie Lindsay: Deborah, first, congratulations on such an accomplishment, and thank you for taking the time to chat with me. I always want to know what inspired a story, what was the ‘why now?’ moment? Was it a feeling, an image, an event, a legacy, a compulsion? Was there a line or something you kept returning to?

Deborah Derrickson Kossmann: Thanks so much, Leslie. The “why now” was the aftermath of the clean-out and the shame about the situation. I had written pieces of the historical story prior to 2016 when I had shopped a very different memoir around to agents. The feedback was that “something” was missing from the manuscript. I’d been protective of my mother (and, if I’m being totally honest, of myself and the rest of my family). I’d vowed not to write about her until she was gone. But after what occurred with the house, I gave myself permission to shape the narrative around how the hoarding, family secrets and of course, my mother, were very much my story to tell. Ironically, it was the hoarding that organized the book!

LL: I loved the writing style of this memoir, the way you were able to embody your younger self and tell some of the earlier sections from a child’s point of view. Can you talk about how you developed this voice, if it was your intention all along, or if it arose organically?

DDK: It was critical to the narrative to capture what it was like to be a child and experience what I did. Children know far more than we give them credit for. I wanted to invite readers to feel the powerlessness and confusion of that age. I also wanted them to remember what it is like to have an incomplete intellectual understanding, but the emotional knowing that many of us experience when we are younger. It was organic. I’d written about some of these events in the past—in my poetry and in other unpublished work. The technical risk is that using a child’s voice can put readers off if the writer’s focus isn’t laser sharp. By choosing the descriptions of behaviors and interactions I did, I hoped to give readers more than just the child’s perspective, so they could apply the adult filter of understanding to what the child is talking about. I suppose, by writing that way, I was also giving myself the validation and respect my mother couldn’t do during those events when I was growing up.

LL: As for structure, which is nonlinear, you do a wonderful job of pacing and pulling the past into the present, the present into the past. It’s almost as if the two ‘voices,’ merge into one as the book meets the half-way point. I’m curious if you wanted to show this intermingling in those terms, if the child voice and adult voice were part of the overall structure?

DDK: (Laughing) I had a terrible struggle structuring this book and am so happy you feel that way about it! I think many memoirs get what I call “soggy” in the middle or tend to fall flat at the end. I was determined not to let that happen. One of the quotes I couldn’t get permission to use as an epigraph talks about how when you are a child you are surrounded by mirrors reflecting yourself, but when you grow up you see they are windows looking out onto the world.

Growing up is about integrating what’s past and I wanted my story to reflect that process (pun intended). My favorite books, poetry and essays tend to be nonlinear. As a reader, I like it when I get to put things together between spaces, like a puzzle. Everything in my mother’s house collided with my memories, almost like dreaming. I wanted the back and forth between past and present, but to still have the forward propulsive movement of the narrative. The way to do that was to have my voice grow too. I have learned through my long writing practice to trust my voice. It’s the wisest part of me and I always listen to it, particularly in my early drafts when I’m excavating for the truth.

LL: The clean-out was immense, to say the least. It took a sheer amount of back-breaking work, time, effort, and so much. Six weeks, three large dumpsters, at least fifteen trips to Goodwill, 320 contractor bags of ruined possessions and garbage. You hired an auctioneer to come for the rest. The house was sold to a house flipper, who sold it to a divorced dad of two. I want to ask about your emotional and physical state at the beginning of this arduous task, and again at the end. I am also curious about the parallels of a divorced mother of two daughters first occupying the home (your mother, you, and young sister), and then later, the father with children.

DDK: I’ve always been good in a crisis. I was in shock for the first couple of weeks and then had a full-blown acute stress reaction from dealing with it. Part of how I’ve always processed what’s been overwhelming has been journaling (I’m up to 72 notebooks that I’ve been keeping since I was 17). I’d come home after each fourteen-hour day and dump my reactions, feelings, details about what I’d seen or had been said in my notebook without judgement or commentary. I had to put it someplace and I knew from my work with trauma as a psychologist that I wasn’t processing any of this in the usual way. It was so overwhelming I was afraid I wouldn’t remember important parts of it. Some of that material is in the book.

At the end of the clean-out, I was exhausted and kept getting sick (the house wasn’t great for my allergies and asthma). I had nightmares and I had to manage my reactivity because my sister and I were dealing with relocating and settling my mom. I certainly wasn’t my most patient with anybody and it took a few months to get back to baseline. That said, there are still smells that can trigger me. I feel like the image of the new family living in that house was a kind of chef’s kiss from the universe. It was so perfect. When we moved there when I was an adolescent, the house had been a new beginning for my family. Cleaned out, it was now another family’s fresh start. It felt like we’d managed to correct a bad spell or turn the universe right side up.

LL: I found a good deal of metaphor with water throughout the pages of Lost Found Kept. Immediately, I noted your mother had a copy of The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacqueline Mitchard, in the house, water-logged and ruined. Later, it’s mentioned that as a child, a school assignment of yours was to create a map of something, and your mother immediately thought to create a map of the ocean floor with clay.

The project, as so many childhood assignments, became ‘her’ project. You even recalled anticipatory embarrassment of bringing that to school to turn in…which I think sort of foreshadows your feelings about the house. Mitchard’s book, I might add, is about loss. Loss of a child, in particular. Can you talk a little more about that, please? And other instances in which water and tsunamis come into play?

DDK: I’m happy the metaphors worked for you when you read it. The Mitchard book was a coincidence, I found several copies of the book in the clean-out, so it must have spoken to my mother—the main character is absorbed in her grief and it’s about family loss which I think was one of the causes of my mother’s hoarding behavior. On a surface level, the ocean was always deeply meaningful to my mother and my family—we are beach people. When we finally got inside the house, I kept describing what we found as an “ocean of stuff.” Scattered everywhere were endless numbers of seashells that my mother had collected which reinforced that image. Coincidentally, I met Jackie during a Ragdale residency not long after I started working on this version of the memoir. Over coffee, she asked the razor-sharp question I mention in the book. “How was it that you didn’t know about the hoarding sooner?” Her comment stuck with me, and I tried to keep that focus as one of the central questions of the story. In Jungian psychology, water imagery is a maternal archetype and represents the unconscious and what’s underneath—a whole other world.

The scene with the ocean floor map and my mother is one of my favorites from the book because it’s about trying to understand that deeper world and how I’m trying to do that with my mother. And you are right about the scene foreshadowing my later shame. Tsunamis have fascinated me since I saw a movie in high school about them. Something huge happens, an earthquake, but on the surface of the water the event barely causes a ripple and then it continues moving until it can’t. Then you can see it and it destroys everything. That felt like another truth about the house. My unconscious certainly fished up the images I needed.

LL: Your mom was an excellent R.N. She was a director of nursing at one point. She took care of her uniforms, starched her hat, wore the white hose. Nurses must be precise and organized; tidy. I think many people would find it hard to believe a nurse could live in such filth. What hoarding is under the surface, is about loss and grief, and perhaps an addiction. To stuff. To people. To holding on, when letting go is what needs to happen. Can you speak into that, please?

DDK: There is a phenomenon called “clutter blindness” where your brain habituates to mess and chaos and you don’t see it anymore. Using this defense, you can avoid some of the anxiety and unpleasant thoughts associated with the hoarding, but as a coping skill it doesn’t allow you to fix your situation. Numbers vary, but roughly 1 in 40 people in the US may have a “Hoarding Disorder” which became an official psychiatric diagnostic category in 2013. It’s not all that well understood in my field. All those things are true that you reference. In addition, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, cognitive decline in aging, and yes, addiction–the thrill of finding something with meaning, like the perfect gift for someone, can all be part of it. What was so hard to understand was how resourceful my mother had to be to dig herself in like this and keep it going for so long. I think of the house as a kind of lair or a wall that she felt protected her. She was full of contradictions.

During the worst of the hoarding, she volunteered at the public library and had a very organized office where she repaired books. In another example, the frog cabinet I mention a few times in the book had a brass key used to close it. When we were cleaning out the hoarding house I looked everywhere and couldn’t find it. A few months afterwards, I realized my mother had already given it to me. She’d made me a very thoughtful gift a year prior to everything happening. It was a funky and very artistic key holder for my front door, and she decorated it using antique keys she’d bought and found, including that one. She was a frustrated artist and writer. Many people who hoard are also very sensitive and creative individuals. It’s hard to reconcile these contradictions.

LL: So much of Lost Found Kept is about the hold objects have over us, that objects, including photographs, have history, that they dwell within. Can you talk about what items you uncovered that you had a deep emotional response to, either positive or negative, and if you kept anything?

DDK: Oh, I kept things! Some of the artwork and the valuable antiques and as many of the photographs and papers as I could salvage. I’m the only person in the world who owns a full unbroken set of crystal glassware because it had been packed away for years. I happily use it now. In high school, I’d made a handmade book using pen and ink and watercolor illustrating a nonsense poem my grandfather used to recite to us. It had been wrapped in a plastic bag in a drawer, so it didn’t smell too badly, and I was so pleased to have that. I kept a painting from my grandmother’s house I’d always liked as a child.

The hardest thing to think about now is what I didn’t keep or that we didn’t find. I suppose I am my mother’s daughter in a way, so it’s the loss that resonates for me. Some of my other school artwork was ruined (I was originally going to be a visual artist until I changed majors in college). I think about the brass bookends shaped like ships that she’d probably gotten for me because she knew they’d remind me of my favorite Narnia book. They ended up being auctioned because we were so overwhelmed. I still feel terrible that we never found my sister’s baby book. Both my sister and I did a lot of cleaning out in our own houses after this experience. It became very important to both of us to be intentional in our relationships with “things.”

LL: Was it healing at all? To keep or relinquish? How about the process of writing the book? Did you find it freeing or re-traumatizing?

DDK: The healing part of the clean-out was having validation about my mother’s mental illness and how it influenced her relationships. I’d struggled with this all my life. The process of writing memoir is hard because every memoirist wants to include details and events that are very important to the writer but aren’t vital to the reader’s understanding of the story. In a way, there’s a kind of editorial clean-out that happens to the detritus of every narrative. I wanted this book to be clear, like glassy water where you see things underneath as you sail through it. Using metaphor, nonlinearity, certain kinds of description all added to the layers of meaning, hopefully without slowing the story down.

I struggled most with the biological father chapter. There’s so much there—it’s another book, but not this one. I needed some part of that story in Lost Found Kept because it helped with the reader’s understanding of the family history. Other than my dissertation I’d never written anything this long and to make writing it easier, I tried to think of each chapter as a self-contained piece of writing, almost like an essay, and just let it riff off the other chapters. I strongly believe that you can’t write well about trauma if you are still traumatized. I think material needs to be processed and understood to be used effectively. Writing this book is a story in time, but it, of course, isn’t the whole story. My mother died three months before I found out the book had won the inaugural Aurora Polaris Creative Nonfiction Award, and I had to decide about whether to include her passing when I did the final edits. The thing about death when you have a complicated relationship is that it ends the hope that things between you can ever be different. When we grieve the person, we are often grieving the death of that hope as well.

LL: Finally, I am curious about your path to publication. Can you touch on that a bit before we end? And also, if there is anything else you would like to add that I may have forgotten?

DDK: This is my first book, so I guess I’m a bit of a late bloomer. In the fall of 2020 after I finished the manuscript, I started out querying for an agent (I’d gotten one after my first “Modern Love” column in 2007 who didn’t work out and we parted ways before my second “Modern Love” appeared in 2014). Along with that, I worked to write and place essays based on the book. The Nashville Review accepted “Churn” in 2021 and that essay also appeared in Memoir Monday that year. The chapter “What We Hold On To” from the memoir appeared in 2022 in The Woven Tale Press. Then in the spring of 2023 “Drowning in Debris” ran in Psychotherapy Networker.

All through that time I was being rejected by literary agents and was feeling totally frustrated. I realized there are a lot of paths to getting a book into the world and decided that LOST FOUND KEPT would be a better fit for a quality smaller independent/university type press, so I started exploring those options and basically gave up on the literary agent idea. I also submitted to a few contests, but only ones that were well respected. Trio House Press had published a friend of mine’s poetry, so I had heard about them and knew their books were beautiful.

I submitted for the 2023 inaugural Aurora Polaris Creative Nonfiction Award and forgot to write down on my submission list that I had done so. 2023 was a terrible year mostly. My mother died, my father-in-law died, and we had another house of forty plus years to clean out. There were health issues, auto accidents—you name it, and it happened. Three months after my mother died, I was surprised to find out I’d won (I’d forgotten I’d submitted it!) and that the book would be published. My mother loved astronomy and space, and it felt to me that maybe she was sending me a message that she was okay with my doing this. I was so happy that Trio House Press understood and loved the book.

LL: Congratulations, Deborah, on such a troubling, but touching memoir. It was lovely to chat with you.

DDK: Leslie—I’m grateful for your thought-provoking questions. My website is lostfoundkept.com and if anyone is interested in book groups or having a speaker, I’m happy to chat. I’ll be at AWP and hope to meet you and Hippocampus readers there! It’s been a pleasure speaking with you. Thanks so much for your interest.