Rise Above: A Memoir

An unforgettable memoir of fatherhood, grief, and the life-saving power of love and art in the wake of unimaginable loss

“This is a story that nobody should ever have to tell, yet Matthew Schnipper does so with grace, rawness, and beauty.”—Hua Hsu, Pulitzer Prize–winning and New York Times bestselling author of Stay True

Renzo Rollins Schnipper was born in February 2020, a split second before the beginning of the pandemic. To his parents, he was the reason for the universe’s existence at a time when there was little hope to be found in the world. Then, on Christmas Eve 2021, a rare medical event suddenly took Renzo from them. Rise Above begins with an account of Renzo’s short, but blazingly full, life from his father’s perspective. Even as it is an account of grief, Matthew Schnipper’s memoir is about resilience in the face of the unexpected turns life takes, and how to chart a path forward.

Schnipper chronicles the tragic, frustrating, and sometimes dumb ways that grief manifests, and how he tried to rise above the pain: friendships, text messages, carbs, a trip to Miami, phone calls with a rabbi, selling vintage clothing—and, perhaps most indelibly, his ever-changing relationship to music, his lifelong passion.

Rise Above follows this journey—from the shock and freefall following his son’s death, to the desperate struggle to remember and honor Renzo’s life. Schnipper’s candid prose and clear-eyed storytelling tackles the darkest, most unfathomable elements of living, but also the miracle of love and the shimmering moments that ultimately give life meaning.