Jewish Book Council Praises 'Found and Lost: The Jake and Cait Story'

I spoke with author Diane Gottlieb about the themes behind my novel: the passage of time, the power of music, and what happens when your beshert is not what you expected.

Just in time for my May 29 pub date and for Jewish American Heritage Month, the Jewish Book Council ran a very positive review of my new novel, Found and Lost: The Jake and Cait Story, which is available now through Vine Leaves Press or Amazon. Here’s an excerpt, written by author Diane Got­tlieb.

While Found and Lost is great fun, the nov­el also asks some impor­tant ques­tions: How do we change as we grow old­er? Can com­mon­al­i­ties tran­scend our dif­fer­ences? Can we tru­ly for­give anoth­er — or our­selves? Read­ers may find them­selves think­ing about soul­mates or bash­ert. Ulti­mate­ly, Found and Lost is a sto­ry about many dif­fer­ent expres­sions of love — the love we expe­ri­ence in our youth and in lat­er life, the love of music and of a time — the 1980s — when the pace was slow­er; and the world seemed kinder. Lovy’s nov­el is a much-need­ed nov­el of hope and opti­mism that leaves read­ers a lit­tle wis­er, with a full heart and a smile.

You can read Diane’s review here.

Not included in the review was a conversation Diane and I had about the book a few months ago. With her permission, here’s an edited transcript below because I think our discussion perfectly captures all the major themes covered Found and Lost: The Jake and Cait Story—from aging and the passage of time to music and novel-writing pre-October 7, and finding your beshert. I hope you enjoy it.

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Diane Gottlieb: Congratulations on the book, Howard! It really was great fun to read. When I was younger, I spent many wonderful summers at sleepaway camp, and I know how romance can bud and blossom there at the speed of light and feel so real and everlasting. The relationship between Jake and Cait, the main characters of your novel who met at sleepaway camp, brought back a lot of memories for me. I am curious about your own experience at summer camp.

Howard Lovy: Growing up, I was a band nerd. I played clarinet and also participated in theater. Every summer, I went to Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp in Michigan and had a wonderful time. I loved it so much that when I went to college, I became a counselor for two summers at Interlochen in Northern Michigan. It’s a world-renowned art school during the academic year and an arts camp in the summer. That experience became the basis for my book. It’s fiction, but I drew heavily on the Northern Michigan and musical setting and the emotions tied to those memories. We were immersed in music, and that inspired me to imagine two characters, musicians Jake and Cait, who meet there, fall in love, and create music together. That’s where the story began.

Diane Gottlieb: Jake and Cait are not exactly star-crossed lovers, but they do come from very different backgrounds. Can you tell us about their different upbringings?

Howard Lovy: Jake is Jewish and Cait is Catholic, and while religion is not important to Jake, his Jewish heritage is. For Cait, religion is a central part of her being, yet she is struggling with it. She is searching for a form of worship that is simpler than the Catholicism she grew up with. She's also very steeped in classical music, plays the violin and cello along with guitar. Jake just picked up the guitar a few weeks ago and started banging around, so he's not anywhere as sophisticated. Still, the two click immediately. When they first meet, they finish each other's sentences, and then that translates into the music they make—they finish each other’s musical sentences. It becomes this kind of playful back and forth until they realize they're doing something people enjoy listening to. Individually, they're not incredibly great players, but together they mesh. They come from completely different backgrounds, different philosophies, different ways of looking at the world, but somehow, they come together perfectly with this one thing.

Diane Gottlieb: You use a lot of fun musical and cultural references. The novel is a love affair on many levels, including a love affair with music, and with the ’80s.I think people are hungry to immerse themselves in a space that is more innocent, purer in many ways than the world we’re living in today. When you were writing, did you feel on some level you were responding to that kind of energy?

Howard Lovy: I was responding to my own memories of that time period, when emotions are heightened, yet events seem more innocent because the world is a little smaller. Jake and Cait are separated from the world in this camp. Later in life, when we meet them again in middle age, they have families and other commitments. Everything is more complicated. Things were simpler when they first met, not just because it was the 1980s, but because they were teenagers.

When I wrote it, I had been writing about antisemitism and Jewish issues for most of my career. I decided at the end of 2022 to take a break from that, to just go completely out of my comfort zone and write a novel.

I thought of this germ of a story that I played around with. I sat down, and it just flowed out of me. After the events of October 7, 2023, could I have written this very optimistic book? I don't know. It’s a snapshot, not just of these characters I created, but of where my mind was at the time. There is tragedy in the book, but overall, it has an optimistic feel to it, and that's what I wanted.

Diane Gottlieb: I think we need optimism more now than we ever did—and especially the possibilities of deeply connecting with somebody with different life experience and a different belief system. You show in the book how they become one with the music, but it also sent a message to me, at least, that we're all one, we're all human, and the things that make us different don't have to separate us.

Howard Lovy: Right.

Diane Gottlieb: I want to mention the structure. The book is written in three alternating parts. There are the 1980s chapters and the present-day and into the future chapters.

And then there are chapters called “Found and Lost: The Jake and Cait Story.” Can you tell us a little bit about the cultural phenomenon Jake and Cait became and the “Found and Lost” chapters?

Howard Lovy: Sure. Part of the book is also about the culture of celebrity and about fame. In their case, fame came completely unexpectedly. They're in their late fifties, have found different careers, different ways of living, and suddenly their old music from the 1980s goes viral in a way that they'd never dreamed it could. People want to know, "Who are these people? Where do they come from, and how did they get this amazing sound?" Eventually, a documentary maker locates them. They refuse to be together in the same room, because at that point, they hadn't seen each other in 40 years and there's some anger and bitterness. They also didn't want the public to see them as old, but as they were when they were 18 and 19, so they refused to be interviewed on camera.

The documentary tells the story of Jake and Cait through the lens of their memory. Everything happened 40 years ago, so some of it is fuzzy. They're unreliable narrators of their own lives, and they disagree with each other about what exactly happened and who did what when. Jake remembers their past very positively, while Cait has more negative memories.

Diane Gottlieb: Did you enjoy writing three different parts?

Howard Lovy: Yes. I like variety when I write, so I put myself in three different moods.

I put myself in the mind of a teenager, how Jake and Cait would act and react at that age. I put my mind in a 59-year-old Jewish man, which is not that difficult because that's what I am, but I tried to imagine how this character matured. How would his views have changed? When you're younger, things are black and white, and then the older you get, the more you see that there's a lot of gray in between.

And then I had fun with the documentary part. I wanted that to be very showbiz-y and surface.

Diane Gottlieb: As teenagers they try to break into the New York music scene. You use a lot of real musicians from the time period—I remember, specifically, Jake and Cait meeting Suzanne Vega—and you imagine what their personalities might be like. That must've been fun for you. It was certainly fun for me, just remembering those days and the clubs.

Howard Lovy: Jake and Cait were a little too naive and clean-cut to be part of the punk scene, but I wanted to try to make them think that they could maybe make it at CBGB. There's a scene I had a lot of fun writing where they try to break into CBGB and that goes horribly wrong.

Diane Gottlieb: Cait was more mature in their younger days. Who do you think sees things more clearly as an adult?

Howard Lovy: In the later years, it gets more complicated because they both have a lot of baggage. Young Cait was unsure of herself, and young Jake was very, very sure of himself. Those roles reversed in middle age. Cait was no longer a religious seeker. She found a very comfortable version of her religion that she practiced; she was very comfortable with how her life turned out. Jake, on the other hand, has been haunted by this relationship for 40 years. He never married. He rejected everyone and was living alone. He realized all the mistakes he made and became a little less strident in his opinions about Cait's Christianity, about religion itself, and about their music. Jake becomes a little less of a jerk, I think.

Diane Gottlieb: Cait was struggling, and Jake had no patience for her religious seeking back in the day.

Howard Lovy: Which is my experience of getting older. When you're 18, you know everything, but it's not backed up by any real information.

And the older you get, the more you know that you don't know.

Diane Gottlieb: One of the themes that you address here is forgiveness and acceptance. And that becomes easier with age. A lot of things do not become easier with age, but that does.

Howard Lovy: It does. Yeah.

As you get older, you don't have the emotional room to be combative anymore. I think about my own father and how mad I was at him when I was a teenager for various things. He's 90 years old now. Thank God he's still alive, and whatever problems we had when I was younger, that's such ancient history, it's not even worth considering anymore. There's nothing to forgive.

The idea of forgiveness, though, for Jake and Cait is a little more complicated. There was some real bitterness that Cait had to think about and get over; so, she goes through a lot to get to that place where she can finally forgive him.

Diane Gottlieb: It's also about forgiving yourself.

Howard Lovy: That's something that Jake is faced with. He did some things when he was younger that he regrets.

He's not so much looking for Cait's forgiveness, although that arrives, it's more how he handles it himself, how he forgives himself and then moves forward.

The book is about how people change over time. What you are as a middle-aged person is still basically the same person you were as a teenager, but there are differences and experiences, and that affect how you view the world. There's this scene where Jake tries to do a Pete Townshend-style windmill power chord, and he hurts his back. So, I played it for laughs a little bit, but I hope I get across the feeling of aging. The idea of two older people going viral in a very young person's business.

People made a lot of jokes about old people, but at the same time they were listening to their music and getting something out of it.

Diane Gottlieb: You talked a little bit about wanting to take a little break from the nonfiction writing you had been doing forever. Anything else, though? Instead of just leaving something for a while, was there any real pull toward novel writing?

Howard Lovy: It was so freeing to write a novel. I realized that if I could control this made-up world of fiction, I could say a lot of things about reality, about religion, music, connection, about fame and aging. These are larger truths that I want to get across based on my 59 years of experience on this earth, but it's through a made-up story. It's a way of thinking I hadn't done before.

I don't want people to think this is a moralizing book. I don't hit people over the head with it. I tell them a story. And readers can get a little endorphin rush when they come to conclusions by themselves. So, I'm not saying, "This book is about this, and you should think this and this and this." It's more like, "This is the situation. This is what he said. This is what she said. This is what they all did. What do you think about it?"

Diane Gottlieb: You certainly don't tell us what to think, but you tell us what they think. It's not moralizing, but the book certainly makes the reader think about big things.

Howard Lovy: I hope so.

Diane Gottlieb: What is next for you? Are you going to write another novel? You have another story brewing?

Howard Lovy: I do have another Jake and Cait Story in me.

I imagine what happened to these characters in the 40-year gap.

So, we'll call it a middle-quel. I'm hoping that people will enjoy this book and will want another. Meanwhile, I'm working on some nonfiction, back to my writing about antisemitism, so that's coming up next. I'll go back and forth between fiction and nonfiction.

Diane Gottlieb: Are Jake and Cait soulmates?

Howard Lovy: I think of the Jewish version of soulmate, beshert, which is more like destiny. That’s how I envision Jake and Cait. They had a destiny together. I made them very different on purpose because I wanted to explore what happens when your soulmate is somebody you wouldn't ordinarily hang out with. What do you do then? There is something otherworldly about it. But I believe a shared passion—like music—can transcend those differences. It becomes a bridge, helping people create lasting, powerful connections that go beyond what divides them.

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If you’d like to read an excerpt of my novel, you can find a passage on Oldster Magazine. You can purchase Found and Lost: The Jake and Cait Story through Vine Leaves Press, Amazon, and wherever you can find great books.