I started a book club at my library called Virtual Author Visit – each month we call the author whose book we’re discussing and talk with them – and our first selection was Amanda Eyre Ward’s novel How to Be Lost. The story centers on Caroline, a once-promising pianist who now waitresses at a past-its-prime New Orleans bar, numbing herself with alcohol. As a young girl, Caroline and her sisters, Madeline and Ellie, turned to each other to deal with her parents’ toxic marriage and their father’s alcohol-infused abuse. Then one day, Ellie disappeared, and it was this traumatic event which shattered whatever was left of the family. Caroline rebelled with self-destructive behavior, growing apart from her remaining sister. Years later, at the request of her mother, Caroline sets out on a cross-country quest to find her long-lost sister.

The premise of this novel is a sombre one, that has the potential to be enormously depressing; however, Ward manages to infuse her telling of the story with humor, so that I found myself laughing out loud at certain passages. Even with their faults and foibles, I truly liked these characters; they would be people I’d befriend in real life. The lighthearted tone despite the seriousness of the characters’ situation was endearing and the seemingly disparate tones complemented one another well.

Amanda Eyre Ward (is that not the coolest middle name?) herself was gregarious and easygoing, a pleasure for our fledgling group to talk to, and I’m eager to read more of her work. The paperback copy of How to Be Lost has an author interview, and she mentions that one of her favorite authors is Alice Munro, a writer whose work I was introduced to during a Canadian Fiction course in college, but had not read since. After reading Ward’s book, I added Open Secrets to my Canadian Fiction Challenge choices, and greedily read the book within a few days, even though I tried to pace out my reading of each short story. Watch for a post on that book soon.