How to Be Lost

by Amanda Eyre Ward

MacAdam/Cage, 290 pp., $24

Unlike this paper’s esteemed Books editor, I am not acquainted with former Chronicle contributor Amanda Eyre Ward, so I have absolutely no qualms about singing the praises of How to Be Lost, Ward’s second novel, to the heavens. I loved this book. I loved it so much that I read it in one day on the road from Washington, D.C., to Atlantic City, breaking only to play video poker. I love Ward’s lean, elegant prose, which is subtly intimate, not painting the characters too broadly. I love how Ward chooses not to write her women as long-suffering martyrs, but as endearingly unsympathetic drunks with damaged souls but good intentions. How to Be Lost tells the story of a family devastated by a terrible loss, the mysterious disappearance of a 5-year-old girl, and how her mother and remaining sisters attempt to rewrite their lives around the space left by her absence. The narrative unfolds from the perspective of the oldest sister, Caroline, a former piano prodigy turned New Orleans cocktail waitress. She slowly reveals that her family was hideously fractured long before Ellie’s disappearance; her abduction and presumed murder only served to deepen the schisms. Mysterious and hilarious letters from someone named Agnes Fowler pepper the narrative; the lonely librarian reaches out desperately, indiscriminately, in an attempt to fill in the blanks of her own hazy, poorly remembered past. The letters are charming, embarrassing, and thrillingly stilted, providing the comic relief for a wrenching story of loss, betrayal, and bone-crushing heartbreak. If it sounds cheesy or clichéd to say that as Caroline enacts the search for her missing sister, she finds the family she’s been missing, take it as a testament to Ward’s deft touch that the novel is anything but clichéd or cheesy and nothing less than a joy to read. – Melanie Haupt

Saturday, Oct. 30, 1-2pm, CE2.010
See www.texasbookfestival.org for full schedule.

This article appears in Iraqi Day of the Dead.

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James graduated from Columbia University in 2000 and moved to Austin a year later. Ever since, he has followed the arts and video game scene in ATX, editing and writing stories for the Chronicle along the way. Over his more than 20 years with the paper he has climbed the "corporate" ladder from lowly intern to managing editor.