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The Hero of This Book
Named a Top Ten Best Book of the Year by Time and People
Named a Best Book of the Year Washington Post * Kirkus Reviews * New Yorker * Chicago Public Library * NPR * Oprah Daily * Philadelphia Enquirer
A taut, groundbreaking, and highly acclaimed novel from bestselling and award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken, about a writer's relationship with her larger-than-life mother--and about the very nature of writing, memory, and art
Ten months after her mother's death, the narrator of The Hero of This Book takes a trip to London. The city was a favorite of her mother's, and as the narrator wanders the streets, she finds herself reflecting on her mother's life and their relationship. Thoughts of the past meld with questions of the Back in New England, the family home is now up for sale, its considerable contents already winnowed.
The narrator, a writer, recalls all that made her complicated mother extraordinary--her brilliant wit, her generosity, her unbelievable obstinacy, her sheer will in seizing life despite physical difficulties--and finds herself wondering how her mother had endured. Even though she wants to respect her mother's nearly pathological sense of privacy, the woman must come to terms with whether making a chronicle of this remarkable life constitutes an act of love or betrayal.
The Hero of This Book is a searing examination of grief and renewal, and of a deeply felt relationship between a child and her parents. What begins as a question of filial devotion ultimately becomes a lesson in what it means to write. At once comic and heartbreaking, with prose that delights at every turn, this is a novel of such piercing love and tenderness that we are reminded that art is what remains when all else falls away.
Named a Best Book of the Year Washington Post * Kirkus Reviews * New Yorker * Chicago Public Library * NPR * Oprah Daily * Philadelphia Enquirer
A taut, groundbreaking, and highly acclaimed novel from bestselling and award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken, about a writer's relationship with her larger-than-life mother--and about the very nature of writing, memory, and art
Ten months after her mother's death, the narrator of The Hero of This Book takes a trip to London. The city was a favorite of her mother's, and as the narrator wanders the streets, she finds herself reflecting on her mother's life and their relationship. Thoughts of the past meld with questions of the Back in New England, the family home is now up for sale, its considerable contents already winnowed.
The narrator, a writer, recalls all that made her complicated mother extraordinary--her brilliant wit, her generosity, her unbelievable obstinacy, her sheer will in seizing life despite physical difficulties--and finds herself wondering how her mother had endured. Even though she wants to respect her mother's nearly pathological sense of privacy, the woman must come to terms with whether making a chronicle of this remarkable life constitutes an act of love or betrayal.
The Hero of This Book is a searing examination of grief and renewal, and of a deeply felt relationship between a child and her parents. What begins as a question of filial devotion ultimately becomes a lesson in what it means to write. At once comic and heartbreaking, with prose that delights at every turn, this is a novel of such piercing love and tenderness that we are reminded that art is what remains when all else falls away.
181 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 4, 2022
689 people are currently reading
17735 people want to read
About the author
Elizabeth McCracken
46 books978 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
Elizabeth McCracken (born 1966) is an American author. She is married to the novelist Edward Carey, with whom she has two children - August George Carey Harvey and Matilda Libby Mary Harvey. An earlier child died before birth, an experience which formed the basis for McCracken's memoir, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination.
McCracken, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, graduated from Newton North High School in Newton, Massachusetts, and holds a degree in library science from Simmons College, a women's college in Boston. McCracken currently lives in Saratoga Springs, New York, where she is an artist-in-residence at Skidmore College. She is the sister of PC World magazine editor-in-chief Harry McCracken.
Elizabeth McCracken (born 1966) is an American author. She is married to the novelist Edward Carey, with whom she has two children - August George Carey Harvey and Matilda Libby Mary Harvey. An earlier child died before birth, an experience which formed the basis for McCracken's memoir, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination.
McCracken, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, graduated from Newton North High School in Newton, Massachusetts, and holds a degree in library science from Simmons College, a women's college in Boston. McCracken currently lives in Saratoga Springs, New York, where she is an artist-in-residence at Skidmore College. She is the sister of PC World magazine editor-in-chief Harry McCracken.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 994 reviews
August 13, 2022
Is this brilliant piece on what it’s like to be a writer or is it just clever? Is it an autobiographical novel or a memoir? Is it an ode to writing or a tribute to her mother? I couldn’t decide. McCracken says it’s not a memoir but for most of this, that’s exactly what it seemed like to me. Of course I was curious and looked around a little for some facts about her life and found that there are not just similarities, but some specific things that were exactly the same for the author as the narrator.
Perhaps she’s saying something about how much a writer’s self is depicted in their writing. She talks about fiction vs memoir a lot. Actually there’s a lot about writing in this book, but there’s also genuine love, grief and admiration for her mother or for the mother of the narrator. I can’t say I was totally taken with this book. In fact, there were times when I was downright bored and I’ll admit it, I kept wondering throughout what was I reading. Yet, I was at times moved by the touching moments and memories the narrator has of her mother, especially as she walks the streets of London reminiscing about the trip they took before her mother died. So for me, it’s right down the middle with my rating. I wanted to read this because I have enjoyed some of McCracken’s short stories and I will read more, even though this was not a perfect one for me.
I read this with my book buddy, Diane . Great to read together again !
I received a copy of this book from Ecco/HarperCollins through Edelweiss.
Read
April 27, 2024I've never been a great memoir reader but the genre has been rehabilitated for me recently by Natalia Ginzburg because of her very creative approach to writing about her parents in Family Lexicon. And so I was tempted to pick up The Hero of this Book last time I was in a bookshop, and to look inside it.
When I opened it, I found a photo on the fly-leaf of a hand-written dedication which American author Elizabeth McCracken had written to her mother on the fly-leaf of one of her earlier books, Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry. The dedication reads:
For Mom—whose life history I will continue to mine, but who will never—no matter what she or anyone else thinks—appear as a character in my work...
I realised that the hero of the book entitled The Hero of this Book must be the author's mother but that Elizabeth McCracken must have found a creative way to make the book not directly about her.
I realised too, from the opening line of the first chapter, This was the summer before the world stopped, that the book is set in London in August 2019, and as I was in London myself just before Covid hit, I couldn't resist buying it.
The opening line might easily have read, 'This was the summer after the world stopped' because it quickly becomes clear that when her beloved mother died in 2018, the world did kind of stop for Elizabeth McCracken.
And so she set out alone for London as a way of honoring the feisty and brave woman who had given her the gift of life and with whom she'd visited London many times, the final trip, just three years before.
The book is a record of one day in London: how the author/narrator set out early from her hotel in Clerkenwell and walked towards the Thames, stopping to admire St Paul's, then crossed the river to the Tate Modern, then on to the Tate Britain, and later to the Strand area where she spent the evening at the theatre before returning weary to Clerkenwell.
It could easily be argued that the hero of this book is the narrator herself. She's alone the whole time, and apart from a person she shares a few words with while waiting for a lift, or a waiter she chats to in the Tate café, or the ticket seller in the theatre who doesn't understand that she only needs one ticket, she is the only character in the book.
But during that London day, every choice she makes: which exhibits to linger over, which to move on from, the decision to have wine instead of coffee, to eat a brownie instead of a sandwich, to go to the theatre instead of to a restaurant, everything is related to the 'character' who is not with her in London, the real 'hero of this book', her much loved mother.
At one point, the narrator stands in front of a 17th century painting known as 'The Chalmondeley Sisters' (according to Wiki, the inscription on the back of the painting reads: Two Ladies of the Cholmondeley Family, Who were born the same day, Married the same day, And brought to Bed the same day).
The narrator describes how she looked from one to the other, thinking they were the same person one minute, thinking they looked completely different the next.
Reading this book was a bit like that for me. Sometimes I thought it was just about one person, sometimes about two, sometimes about one mirrored through the other. The narrator eventually explained that thought to me:
I had gone there [the Tate Britain] on a different trip with my mother, when I'd been in my 30s and she in her 60s. This, I suddenly realized, was shortly after her own mother had died and she come into a little money, enough for a plane ticket. I hadn't forgotten that trip, but I had forgotten that it, too, was just after a mother's death. All the London visits of my life were layered over one another like posters pasted up on a city wall. As I went through the city, I experienced all these trips at one time, sometimes worn away, so I could clearly see the earliest one, sometimes quite thick so I could feel the buildup of travel, a kind of blurred accumulated familiarity. I knew there was a fancy word for this effect—palimpsest, pentimenta—but I am a child of the 1970s and I heard distant horns and thought, '8-track tape'.
This book is a very fine 8-track tape.
…………………………………………
My reading life is also like an 8-track tape.
At one point, the narrator says, I have a photograph of my mother at a flea market in What Cheer, Iowa...
The mention of the town called 'What Cheer' took me back to a reading experience of more than ten years ago, a book about a long bus journey to that very town, and a narrator who was searching for a long-lost mother figure. That book was called Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.
When I opened it, I found a photo on the fly-leaf of a hand-written dedication which American author Elizabeth McCracken had written to her mother on the fly-leaf of one of her earlier books, Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry. The dedication reads:
For Mom—whose life history I will continue to mine, but who will never—no matter what she or anyone else thinks—appear as a character in my work...
I realised that the hero of the book entitled The Hero of this Book must be the author's mother but that Elizabeth McCracken must have found a creative way to make the book not directly about her.
I realised too, from the opening line of the first chapter, This was the summer before the world stopped, that the book is set in London in August 2019, and as I was in London myself just before Covid hit, I couldn't resist buying it.
The opening line might easily have read, 'This was the summer after the world stopped' because it quickly becomes clear that when her beloved mother died in 2018, the world did kind of stop for Elizabeth McCracken.
And so she set out alone for London as a way of honoring the feisty and brave woman who had given her the gift of life and with whom she'd visited London many times, the final trip, just three years before.
The book is a record of one day in London: how the author/narrator set out early from her hotel in Clerkenwell and walked towards the Thames, stopping to admire St Paul's, then crossed the river to the Tate Modern, then on to the Tate Britain, and later to the Strand area where she spent the evening at the theatre before returning weary to Clerkenwell.
It could easily be argued that the hero of this book is the narrator herself. She's alone the whole time, and apart from a person she shares a few words with while waiting for a lift, or a waiter she chats to in the Tate café, or the ticket seller in the theatre who doesn't understand that she only needs one ticket, she is the only character in the book.
But during that London day, every choice she makes: which exhibits to linger over, which to move on from, the decision to have wine instead of coffee, to eat a brownie instead of a sandwich, to go to the theatre instead of to a restaurant, everything is related to the 'character' who is not with her in London, the real 'hero of this book', her much loved mother.
At one point, the narrator stands in front of a 17th century painting known as 'The Chalmondeley Sisters' (according to Wiki, the inscription on the back of the painting reads: Two Ladies of the Cholmondeley Family, Who were born the same day, Married the same day, And brought to Bed the same day).
The narrator describes how she looked from one to the other, thinking they were the same person one minute, thinking they looked completely different the next.
Reading this book was a bit like that for me. Sometimes I thought it was just about one person, sometimes about two, sometimes about one mirrored through the other. The narrator eventually explained that thought to me:
I had gone there [the Tate Britain] on a different trip with my mother, when I'd been in my 30s and she in her 60s. This, I suddenly realized, was shortly after her own mother had died and she come into a little money, enough for a plane ticket. I hadn't forgotten that trip, but I had forgotten that it, too, was just after a mother's death. All the London visits of my life were layered over one another like posters pasted up on a city wall. As I went through the city, I experienced all these trips at one time, sometimes worn away, so I could clearly see the earliest one, sometimes quite thick so I could feel the buildup of travel, a kind of blurred accumulated familiarity. I knew there was a fancy word for this effect—palimpsest, pentimenta—but I am a child of the 1970s and I heard distant horns and thought, '8-track tape'.
This book is a very fine 8-track tape.
…………………………………………
My reading life is also like an 8-track tape.
At one point, the narrator says, I have a photograph of my mother at a flea market in What Cheer, Iowa...
The mention of the town called 'What Cheer' took me back to a reading experience of more than ten years ago, a book about a long bus journey to that very town, and a narrator who was searching for a long-lost mother figure. That book was called Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.
October 16, 2022
Library- overdrive-Audiobook… read by Elizabeth McCracken
…..4 hours and 33 minutes
“There are certain emotions available to me that only happen when I am alone”.
While this story was being told over one week-end in London….
“a woman trying to decide what I thought about my life, winds up wrestling with the memory of her mother. Her mother—who also loved to visit London—died ten months earlier, but her presence is in no way diminished by her death”….
I spent my Saturday morning and afternoon - today- listening to this audiobook.
And now I reflect…..
From the beginning *Dedication*….I was moved.
Clearly…Elizabeth McCracken loved her mother…..and what a touching tribute to her deceased mother from the start.
I had already read other reviews from several ‘friends/readers’ ….whom I cherish and respect. Three friends-three different ratings: 5 stars. 3 stars. 2.5 stars.
It seemed to me that the ‘great-or-not’ debate > flat or wonderful > had something to do with the styling—(some awkwardness as to was this REALLY a memoir? — and if yes— why say it’s a novel — when the secret can be seen by everyone — it’s a memoir!
…The narrator is middle age —(so is Elizabeth McCracken).
…The narrator is a writer (so is Elizabeth McCracken)
…The narrator is single and has never been a mother (same as Elizabeth McCracken)
…..So….
I’ve concluded this ‘is’ a memoir …. I think I even understand why it’s advertised and creatively written as a novel….
…..it has something — profoundly — to do with ‘emotions’ (vulnerable ones that hurt)….and wishing for a little privacy ‘while’ also wanting to honor one’s mother with dignity.
( just my thoughts about the choice of styling)>
As I have no idea if I’m right, or completely clueless….
— but for me —
while listening to Elizabeth McCracken ‘read’ her own ‘novel’….my little heart was aching — laughing & aching (at the same time)— regardless of the genre’s label.
Note: I have a few favorite sections too:
…..when Elizabeth (or call her the unnamed narrator —I don’t give a rats ass what one calls her)….was thirty-five years old….
she CLEANED HER PARENTS HOUSE….(I was dying laughing - a total of 4 waffle makers in that grungy kitchen
- a statue of FDR, hands on a ship wheel that was also a clock, fake mosaic tile on the floor,
3-year old cheese in the refrigerator…etc.
——the dialogue was priceless and precious!!!
The comically outdated kitchen — dirty — even in 1974 — was atrocious….
Hoarders-R-us….. thousands of books that need to go somewhere—
I don’t know — hell -
I found this book to be a very affecting 4 hour experience that is now part of my own DNA — till death due us part.
I was fully caught up in the storytelling—the nitty-gritty details that our narrator (ha, maybe we can just say Elizabeth McCracken?)….in ‘what’ she was sharing!
The bridge between memoir & fiction —?/!
Aren’t many books a bridge between memoir and fiction? I think Elizabeth was just being extra overt about it.
Truth is….
….God only knows how very VERY close to home this book is to our lovely author.
Call me bad—-but maybe one needs to be a little bit Jewish to ‘get’ this book. Okay…forgive me for not being g politically correct — but ….
Here’s the bottom line —
I cared for Elizabeth’s small fry, pint size mom. I cared for Elizabeth.
I’ve enjoyed Elizabeth’s writing in the past—-but grew even more in awe of her now…
She’s a words-woman…..another author-smartie!
Elizabeth’s love for her mom!!!
and no matter how much she kinda tried to hide it— (Jewish styling 101)—she couldn’t full all of us.
THIS BOOK IS A PASSIONATE LOVE LETTER TO A WONDERFUL MOM!!! (Pimples, disabilities, and all!)
“Like any nuance narrator she simply declined to introduce herself. She was writing a book about a writer”.
I’m very touched by this FAKE MEMOIR …..
…..(occasionally this book reminded me of my favorite graphic memoir by Roz Chast, “Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant”)
And….
This book was helpful to me personally….
Next week Paul and I are driving down to San Luis Obispo to visit his 85 year old mother….(I picked up some ways-to-behave tips).
Last…
ELIZABETH…..’Bless you’! I’m sorry for your loss. Any mother would be honored to have a daughter like you!
…..4 hours and 33 minutes
“There are certain emotions available to me that only happen when I am alone”.
While this story was being told over one week-end in London….
“a woman trying to decide what I thought about my life, winds up wrestling with the memory of her mother. Her mother—who also loved to visit London—died ten months earlier, but her presence is in no way diminished by her death”….
I spent my Saturday morning and afternoon - today- listening to this audiobook.
And now I reflect…..
From the beginning *Dedication*….I was moved.
Clearly…Elizabeth McCracken loved her mother…..and what a touching tribute to her deceased mother from the start.
I had already read other reviews from several ‘friends/readers’ ….whom I cherish and respect. Three friends-three different ratings: 5 stars. 3 stars. 2.5 stars.
It seemed to me that the ‘great-or-not’ debate > flat or wonderful > had something to do with the styling—(some awkwardness as to was this REALLY a memoir? — and if yes— why say it’s a novel — when the secret can be seen by everyone — it’s a memoir!
…The narrator is middle age —(so is Elizabeth McCracken).
…The narrator is a writer (so is Elizabeth McCracken)
…The narrator is single and has never been a mother (same as Elizabeth McCracken)
…..So….
I’ve concluded this ‘is’ a memoir …. I think I even understand why it’s advertised and creatively written as a novel….
…..it has something — profoundly — to do with ‘emotions’ (vulnerable ones that hurt)….and wishing for a little privacy ‘while’ also wanting to honor one’s mother with dignity.
( just my thoughts about the choice of styling)>
As I have no idea if I’m right, or completely clueless….
— but for me —
while listening to Elizabeth McCracken ‘read’ her own ‘novel’….my little heart was aching — laughing & aching (at the same time)— regardless of the genre’s label.
Note: I have a few favorite sections too:
…..when Elizabeth (or call her the unnamed narrator —I don’t give a rats ass what one calls her)….was thirty-five years old….
she CLEANED HER PARENTS HOUSE….(I was dying laughing - a total of 4 waffle makers in that grungy kitchen
- a statue of FDR, hands on a ship wheel that was also a clock, fake mosaic tile on the floor,
3-year old cheese in the refrigerator…etc.
——the dialogue was priceless and precious!!!
The comically outdated kitchen — dirty — even in 1974 — was atrocious….
Hoarders-R-us….. thousands of books that need to go somewhere—
I don’t know — hell -
I found this book to be a very affecting 4 hour experience that is now part of my own DNA — till death due us part.
I was fully caught up in the storytelling—the nitty-gritty details that our narrator (ha, maybe we can just say Elizabeth McCracken?)….in ‘what’ she was sharing!
The bridge between memoir & fiction —?/!
Aren’t many books a bridge between memoir and fiction? I think Elizabeth was just being extra overt about it.
Truth is….
….God only knows how very VERY close to home this book is to our lovely author.
Call me bad—-but maybe one needs to be a little bit Jewish to ‘get’ this book. Okay…forgive me for not being g politically correct — but ….
Here’s the bottom line —
I cared for Elizabeth’s small fry, pint size mom. I cared for Elizabeth.
I’ve enjoyed Elizabeth’s writing in the past—-but grew even more in awe of her now…
She’s a words-woman…..another author-smartie!
Elizabeth’s love for her mom!!!
and no matter how much she kinda tried to hide it— (Jewish styling 101)—she couldn’t full all of us.
THIS BOOK IS A PASSIONATE LOVE LETTER TO A WONDERFUL MOM!!! (Pimples, disabilities, and all!)
“Like any nuance narrator she simply declined to introduce herself. She was writing a book about a writer”.
I’m very touched by this FAKE MEMOIR …..
…..(occasionally this book reminded me of my favorite graphic memoir by Roz Chast, “Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant”)
And….
This book was helpful to me personally….
Next week Paul and I are driving down to San Luis Obispo to visit his 85 year old mother….(I picked up some ways-to-behave tips).
Last…
ELIZABETH…..’Bless you’! I’m sorry for your loss. Any mother would be honored to have a daughter like you!
August 22, 2022
2.5 I'm not sure why I had such a bland reaction to this book, which so many others, based on reviews, seem to have loved. I read this with Angela and both of our reactions were basically the same. That her mother wax a hero in her own and her daughters life is without doubt. This was a woman who had many health and physical challenges throughout her life and never gave up, she overcame so much. She was a very admirable woman with a strong personality.
I think my biggest problem was the way this was written. I often felt it was more tell than show, especially the parts when she was ruminating on whether to write her mother's memoir, which her mother never wanted, or not. I just didn't feel the emotion, though one could tell, at least mentally, that she loved her mother and was sad she was gone. So, maybe it was the tone. I'm just not sure but I just didn't connect the same way others have seemed too.
ARC by Harper Collins and Goodreads.
I think my biggest problem was the way this was written. I often felt it was more tell than show, especially the parts when she was ruminating on whether to write her mother's memoir, which her mother never wanted, or not. I just didn't feel the emotion, though one could tell, at least mentally, that she loved her mother and was sad she was gone. So, maybe it was the tone. I'm just not sure but I just didn't connect the same way others have seemed too.
ARC by Harper Collins and Goodreads.
June 29, 2022
Thanks to HarperCollins Publishers for my ARC of “The Hero of this Book” by Author Elizabeth McCracken. 📚 ❤️ 🥰
“I have no interest in ordinary people, having met so few of them in my life.”
“My mother and I like churches for their touristic possibilities, filled as they were with sculpture, stained glass, cool in the summertime, dark, occasional music, candlelight, needlepoint. We didn’t like church when it was in session.”
The author is in London, where several years earlier she visited with her now-deceased mother, as she ambles down memory lane. Author Elizabeth McCracken draws us breathlessly into stories of her parents, some from long ago and sone from more recent, but all wonderfully told. This is such a great, comfortable read; it’s like conversing with your best friend about stories that are sometimes funny, sometimes absurd, but always ringing true. If your parents are deceased, you’ll find yourself missing them more, and if not, you’ll appreciate them as little better. But you’ll easily identify with each tale in this “un-memoir.” 😁
“I have no interest in ordinary people, having met so few of them in my life.”
“My mother and I like churches for their touristic possibilities, filled as they were with sculpture, stained glass, cool in the summertime, dark, occasional music, candlelight, needlepoint. We didn’t like church when it was in session.”
The author is in London, where several years earlier she visited with her now-deceased mother, as she ambles down memory lane. Author Elizabeth McCracken draws us breathlessly into stories of her parents, some from long ago and sone from more recent, but all wonderfully told. This is such a great, comfortable read; it’s like conversing with your best friend about stories that are sometimes funny, sometimes absurd, but always ringing true. If your parents are deceased, you’ll find yourself missing them more, and if not, you’ll appreciate them as little better. But you’ll easily identify with each tale in this “un-memoir.” 😁
November 24, 2022
The hero of this book is Elizabeth McCracken’s mother, Natalie (1935–2018). Is it autofiction or a bereavement memoir? Both and neither. It’s clear that the subject is her late mother, but less obvious that the first-person narrator must be McCracken or that the framework she has set up – an American writer wanders London, seeing the sights but mostly reminiscing about her mother – is other than fiction.
In August 2019, the writer rents a hotel room in Clerkenwell and plays the flaneuse around the city. Her tour takes in the London Eye, a ferry ride across the Thames from one Tate museum to another, a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and so on. London had been a favourite destination for her and her mother, their final trip together falling just three years before. McCracken is so funny on the quirks of English terminology – and cuisine:
Always, though, her thoughts return to her mother, whom she describes through bare facts and apt anecdotes. A twin born with cerebral palsy. A little disabled Jewish lady with unmanageable hair. An editor and writer based at Boston University. Opinionated, outspoken, optimistic; set in her ways. Delightful and maddening in equal measure – like all of us. (“All mothers are unknowable, being a subset of human beings.”)
The writer’s parents were opposites you never would have paired up. (Her father, too, is gone now, but his death is only an aside here.) Their declines were predictably hard to forecast. The New England family home has been emptied and is now on the market; an excruciating memory resurfaces from the auction of the contents.
As well as a tribute to a beloved mother and a matter-of-fact record of dealing with ageing parents and the aftermath of loss, this is a playful cross-examination of literary genres:
That was An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, about the stillbirth of her first child. As bereavement memoirs go, it’s one of the very best and still, 10 years after I read it, stands as one of my absolute favourite books, with some of the strongest last lines out there. McCracken has done it again, producing a book that, though very different in approach and style (this time reminding me most of Jenny Offill’s Weather), somehow achieves the same poignancy and earns a spot in my personal hall of fame, for the reasons you’ll see below…
The hero of this review is my mother, Carolyn (1947–2022).
I find it hard to believe that she’s been gone for three and a half weeks already. One week after her funeral, I was reading this book on my Kindle in London, waiting for a climate march to start. So many lines penetrated my numbness; all could pertain to my own mother:
The adrenaline of a busy week back in the States – meeting up with family members, writing and delivering a eulogy, packing up most of her belongings, writing thank-you notes, starting on paperwork (“sadmin”) – has long worn off and I’m back into my routines of work and volunteering and trying to make our house habitable as winter sets in. It would be easy to feel as if that middle-of-the-night phone call in late October, and everything that followed, was merely a vivid, horribly extended dream and that tomorrow she’ll pop back up in my inbox with some everyday gossip.
Reminders of her are everywhere if I look. Clothes she gave me, or I inherited from her, or she sent me the money to buy; a box of extra-strong Earl Grey teabags, left over from what we handed out along with memorial cards at the visitation; her well-worn Bible and delicate gold watch; the five boxes of journals in my sister’s basement – 150 volumes each carefully labelled with a number and date range. I have the first few and the last, incomplete one here with me now. What a trove of family stories, precious or painful, await me when I’m strong enough to read them.
With it being Thanksgiving – a whole holiday devoted to gratitude! nothing could more perfectly suit my mother – I’m grateful for all of those mementoes, and for the books that are getting me through. Starting with this one.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
In August 2019, the writer rents a hotel room in Clerkenwell and plays the flaneuse around the city. Her tour takes in the London Eye, a ferry ride across the Thames from one Tate museum to another, a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and so on. London had been a favourite destination for her and her mother, their final trip together falling just three years before. McCracken is so funny on the quirks of English terminology – and cuisine:
The least appetizing words in the world concern English food: salad cream, baps, butties, carvery, goujons.
Always, though, her thoughts return to her mother, whom she describes through bare facts and apt anecdotes. A twin born with cerebral palsy. A little disabled Jewish lady with unmanageable hair. An editor and writer based at Boston University. Opinionated, outspoken, optimistic; set in her ways. Delightful and maddening in equal measure – like all of us. (“All mothers are unknowable, being a subset of human beings.”)
The writer’s parents were opposites you never would have paired up. (Her father, too, is gone now, but his death is only an aside here.) Their declines were predictably hard to forecast. The New England family home has been emptied and is now on the market; an excruciating memory resurfaces from the auction of the contents.
As well as a tribute to a beloved mother and a matter-of-fact record of dealing with ageing parents and the aftermath of loss, this is a playful cross-examination of literary genres:
I hate novels with unnamed narrators. I didn’t mean to write one.
My mother was known to say with disgust, “Oh, those people who write memoirs about the worst thing that ever happened to them!” I said it, too. Some years later a terrible thing happened to me, and there was nothing to do but to write a memoir.
That was An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, about the stillbirth of her first child. As bereavement memoirs go, it’s one of the very best and still, 10 years after I read it, stands as one of my absolute favourite books, with some of the strongest last lines out there. McCracken has done it again, producing a book that, though very different in approach and style (this time reminding me most of Jenny Offill’s Weather), somehow achieves the same poignancy and earns a spot in my personal hall of fame, for the reasons you’ll see below…
The hero of this review is my mother, Carolyn (1947–2022).
I find it hard to believe that she’s been gone for three and a half weeks already. One week after her funeral, I was reading this book on my Kindle in London, waiting for a climate march to start. So many lines penetrated my numbness; all could pertain to my own mother:
[Of a bad time when her mother was in hospital with an infection] Those days were a dress rehearsal for my mother’s easy actual death seven years later.
My mother was a great appreciator. It was a pleasure to take her places, because she enjoyed herself so much and so audibly. That was her form of gratitude.
My mother all by herself was a holiday, very good at buying presents and exceptional at receiving them.
Quirky, somebody once called my mother. What a colossally condescending word: I hate it. It means you’ve decided that you don’t have to take that person seriously.
My mother’s last illness was a brain aneurysm.
The dead have no privacy left, is what I’ve decided.
The adrenaline of a busy week back in the States – meeting up with family members, writing and delivering a eulogy, packing up most of her belongings, writing thank-you notes, starting on paperwork (“sadmin”) – has long worn off and I’m back into my routines of work and volunteering and trying to make our house habitable as winter sets in. It would be easy to feel as if that middle-of-the-night phone call in late October, and everything that followed, was merely a vivid, horribly extended dream and that tomorrow she’ll pop back up in my inbox with some everyday gossip.
Reminders of her are everywhere if I look. Clothes she gave me, or I inherited from her, or she sent me the money to buy; a box of extra-strong Earl Grey teabags, left over from what we handed out along with memorial cards at the visitation; her well-worn Bible and delicate gold watch; the five boxes of journals in my sister’s basement – 150 volumes each carefully labelled with a number and date range. I have the first few and the last, incomplete one here with me now. What a trove of family stories, precious or painful, await me when I’m strong enough to read them.
With it being Thanksgiving – a whole holiday devoted to gratitude! nothing could more perfectly suit my mother – I’m grateful for all of those mementoes, and for the books that are getting me through. Starting with this one.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
April 29, 2022
Saying anything other than simply "wow" seems disingenuous, but I will try to say a little more. I have read and have loved each of Elizabeth's books, but I think this one might be my favorite yet, which is saying something. It's a perfect novel, one in which all of Elizabeth's talents are on display: her gigantic heart, her singular vision, and her profound insight into the human condition. I just can't say enough good things about this book. You simply must read it.
April 28, 2023
I’ve never read anything by McCracken before so I didn't know what to expect, particularly since there is so much variety in peoples' reactions to the book. Now that I've read "Hero," I understand why. As Allison Larkin wrote in her review for the Washington Post (10/11/2022), “The book is hard to categorize. It doesn’t have a splashy hook, and it purposefully defies genre. Page by page, it’s the quiet story of an adult child mourning a parent. As a whole, it’s a map of how to love someone.” I would add to this, it's an endearing, self-aware, sometimes serious/sometimes playful, meditation on how to talk about that love and loss.
Who is the eponymous hero of the book? (What does it say about me that the title brings to mind my daughter’s favorite book when she was young, “The Monster at the End of This Book”? Something, surely.) The author answers the question herself: “My mother loved stories, particularly stories about herself, and she is, I think, the hero of this book, which she would like. But it’s my story, too, I might tell her, even if you are the hero of it.” I'm intrigued by that "but it's my story too," what it's meant to mean. Likewise with mom's the hero "I think."
The author (or her avatar, because... see below) is indeed present in the story too. “The Hero of This Book” is filled with her memories, reflections, thoughts, and feelings about her mother, their relationship with one another, and with writing. More, she lets us know time and again that she's there behind the curtain, commenting, performing, not quite the "I" on the page. There’s no plot to speak of — I’ll come back to that in a minute — but I finished the book with the feeling that it had indeed taken me to somewhere from somewhere else, and that things had happened on its pages.
The book has split character. On one hand, the emotions expressed — grief, sadness, powerlessness, and, yes, joy — all feel authentic and weighty and true. But the interjections and comments -- wry, playful, disingenuous -- frequently take us somewhere else. Make the reader unsure about what it is that he/she is reading, whether the author is signaling a reluctance to share too much, expose her feelings too much. McCracken asserts several times in “Hero” that it is not a memoir: If this were a memoir—it isn’t—the author might talk at length about her own connection to her grandmother on the subject of self-recrimination, how easy it is to blame yourself for the harm that comes to children during pregnancy, and how other people, even well-meaning ones, will blame you, too. It isn’t; she won’t.
So OK, it's not a memoir. But that assertion is less than entirely convincing, since the author writes elsewhere in the book, as if addressing the students taking her writing course, “Perhaps you fear writing a memoir, reasonably. Invent a single man and call your book a novel. The freedom one fictional man grants you is immeasurable.” Is that what she's doing here? Pretending a memoir isn't a memoir - or not quite a memoir? Who, besides the obvious walk-ons, are the true “invented” characters and who the “real”ones? What stories are "true"?
As I was reading “Hero” I imagined myself in conversation with the author and leaning forward conspiratorially to ask how much of the book was real or true. Her enigmatic reply, as I imagined it: “All of it. None of it. Some of it. What do you mean by ‘real’ and 'true'? C'mon, have some more wine.”
Here’s the thing: It is by design that we're uncertain about what to believe in "The Hero of This Book." A large part of that uncertainty is inherent in the genre, of course. Novels, McCracken says, give writers license to lie, to misdirect and deflect (“I’m going to start to say something,” I tell my students, “and we’ll see if I still believe it by the end of the sentence.”). “Hero” takes this misdirection to heart and flaunts it. The author speaks self-deprecatingly of herself and her role as author of the book we’re reading, about writing in general. “Writers are dull by themselves,” she tells us, “intolerable when they gather. Intolerable always. I find myself intolerable, the author of these sentences, which means I am writing a book about a writer.” The transitive law of metafiction.
It's a bit of a Hall of Mirrors. An American writer, half Jewish, in mourning for her mother, walks the streets of London, goes to a show, but she admits it's a guise: “The fictional me is unmarried, an only child, childless. The actual me is not. (The fictional me is the narrator of this book. The actual me is the author.)”
McCracken writes, “My mother had achieved a lot in her life, mostly by ignoring the muttering people who suggested that she might be incapable of things because of her body or gender or religion.” I read this and other things she says about her mom or what her mom herself said, and to me her mother is a complicated, fully formed person. She is short, her mother. She is a Jew from a small town near Des Moines, Iowa. She has a twin sister. She has cerebral palsy. She is fearless. She is stubborn. As I say, she appears fully formed. But does all of this begin to tell us who she was? No: it’s not her mother on the page, it's a character in a book. “My mother. My flesh-and-blood mother, who cannot be represented in any autobiographical or fictional or autofictional prose, not even this sentence I’m currently typing.” Words aren’t enough. Ever.
“Our family is the first novel you know,” McCracken tells us, leaving us to ponder what that means. And so her mother becomes a fictional character in her daughter’s novel, and the author herself also becomes a fictional character in her own novel. And the walls between reality and fiction lose definition. “This sounds like a dream as I describe it now, or a made-up place. It’s not a made-up place, though this is a novel, and the theater might be fictional, and my insistence fictional, and my mother the only real thing, though this version of her is also fictional.”
Or as McCracken writes: "I don’t give a fuck. Or I do, and I’ve just said that to throw you off the trail."
(Readers who need to know the wall between real and unreal is intact in the books they read are now muttering to themselves, ‘Build that wall!’ I'm not serious, of course, but the joke lets me segue to McCracken’s nods to how inconsequential and tenuous ideas like lies and truth now feel, especially to one who invents truths for a living, who probably expresses her rage through postings on social media: The monsters, too, whose power lived in the way they convinced you that you could defeat them with words they’d never read… I had a fantasy that someday I would meet one or two of these monsters, shake a hand, lean forward, and whisper the one thing each would most hate to hear. You do know you’re going to hell. Fat ass. Everyone can tell how stupid you are. God doesn’t love you. Your wife doesn’t love you. Your children will forget you. You’re going to hell. You’re going to hell. You’re going to hell.) [insert sound of my head nodding in fervent agreement]
I loved “The Hero of This Book.” It’s touching, authentically thought-provoking, and often funny as hell. McCracken enjoys the occasional aside, the kind of thing a wordsmith would say. This, for example: “Bedclothes: what a beautiful, mysterious word. No other furniture wears clothing.” And this: “The least appetizing words in the world concern English food: salad cream, baps, butties, carvery, goujons.” (Autocorrect truly doesn’t know what to do with half these words! Me, I’m saving them for Scrabble and Lexulous.)
I must seek out McCracken's other books. And look up what baps, butties, and goujons are.
Who is the eponymous hero of the book? (What does it say about me that the title brings to mind my daughter’s favorite book when she was young, “The Monster at the End of This Book”? Something, surely.) The author answers the question herself: “My mother loved stories, particularly stories about herself, and she is, I think, the hero of this book, which she would like. But it’s my story, too, I might tell her, even if you are the hero of it.” I'm intrigued by that "but it's my story too," what it's meant to mean. Likewise with mom's the hero "I think."
The author (or her avatar, because... see below) is indeed present in the story too. “The Hero of This Book” is filled with her memories, reflections, thoughts, and feelings about her mother, their relationship with one another, and with writing. More, she lets us know time and again that she's there behind the curtain, commenting, performing, not quite the "I" on the page. There’s no plot to speak of — I’ll come back to that in a minute — but I finished the book with the feeling that it had indeed taken me to somewhere from somewhere else, and that things had happened on its pages.
The book has split character. On one hand, the emotions expressed — grief, sadness, powerlessness, and, yes, joy — all feel authentic and weighty and true. But the interjections and comments -- wry, playful, disingenuous -- frequently take us somewhere else. Make the reader unsure about what it is that he/she is reading, whether the author is signaling a reluctance to share too much, expose her feelings too much. McCracken asserts several times in “Hero” that it is not a memoir: If this were a memoir—it isn’t—the author might talk at length about her own connection to her grandmother on the subject of self-recrimination, how easy it is to blame yourself for the harm that comes to children during pregnancy, and how other people, even well-meaning ones, will blame you, too. It isn’t; she won’t.
So OK, it's not a memoir. But that assertion is less than entirely convincing, since the author writes elsewhere in the book, as if addressing the students taking her writing course, “Perhaps you fear writing a memoir, reasonably. Invent a single man and call your book a novel. The freedom one fictional man grants you is immeasurable.” Is that what she's doing here? Pretending a memoir isn't a memoir - or not quite a memoir? Who, besides the obvious walk-ons, are the true “invented” characters and who the “real”ones? What stories are "true"?
As I was reading “Hero” I imagined myself in conversation with the author and leaning forward conspiratorially to ask how much of the book was real or true. Her enigmatic reply, as I imagined it: “All of it. None of it. Some of it. What do you mean by ‘real’ and 'true'? C'mon, have some more wine.”
Here’s the thing: It is by design that we're uncertain about what to believe in "The Hero of This Book." A large part of that uncertainty is inherent in the genre, of course. Novels, McCracken says, give writers license to lie, to misdirect and deflect (“I’m going to start to say something,” I tell my students, “and we’ll see if I still believe it by the end of the sentence.”). “Hero” takes this misdirection to heart and flaunts it. The author speaks self-deprecatingly of herself and her role as author of the book we’re reading, about writing in general. “Writers are dull by themselves,” she tells us, “intolerable when they gather. Intolerable always. I find myself intolerable, the author of these sentences, which means I am writing a book about a writer.” The transitive law of metafiction.
It's a bit of a Hall of Mirrors. An American writer, half Jewish, in mourning for her mother, walks the streets of London, goes to a show, but she admits it's a guise: “The fictional me is unmarried, an only child, childless. The actual me is not. (The fictional me is the narrator of this book. The actual me is the author.)”
McCracken writes, “My mother had achieved a lot in her life, mostly by ignoring the muttering people who suggested that she might be incapable of things because of her body or gender or religion.” I read this and other things she says about her mom or what her mom herself said, and to me her mother is a complicated, fully formed person. She is short, her mother. She is a Jew from a small town near Des Moines, Iowa. She has a twin sister. She has cerebral palsy. She is fearless. She is stubborn. As I say, she appears fully formed. But does all of this begin to tell us who she was? No: it’s not her mother on the page, it's a character in a book. “My mother. My flesh-and-blood mother, who cannot be represented in any autobiographical or fictional or autofictional prose, not even this sentence I’m currently typing.” Words aren’t enough. Ever.
“Our family is the first novel you know,” McCracken tells us, leaving us to ponder what that means. And so her mother becomes a fictional character in her daughter’s novel, and the author herself also becomes a fictional character in her own novel. And the walls between reality and fiction lose definition. “This sounds like a dream as I describe it now, or a made-up place. It’s not a made-up place, though this is a novel, and the theater might be fictional, and my insistence fictional, and my mother the only real thing, though this version of her is also fictional.”
Or as McCracken writes: "I don’t give a fuck. Or I do, and I’ve just said that to throw you off the trail."
(Readers who need to know the wall between real and unreal is intact in the books they read are now muttering to themselves, ‘Build that wall!’ I'm not serious, of course, but the joke lets me segue to McCracken’s nods to how inconsequential and tenuous ideas like lies and truth now feel, especially to one who invents truths for a living, who probably expresses her rage through postings on social media: The monsters, too, whose power lived in the way they convinced you that you could defeat them with words they’d never read… I had a fantasy that someday I would meet one or two of these monsters, shake a hand, lean forward, and whisper the one thing each would most hate to hear. You do know you’re going to hell. Fat ass. Everyone can tell how stupid you are. God doesn’t love you. Your wife doesn’t love you. Your children will forget you. You’re going to hell. You’re going to hell. You’re going to hell.) [insert sound of my head nodding in fervent agreement]
I loved “The Hero of This Book.” It’s touching, authentically thought-provoking, and often funny as hell. McCracken enjoys the occasional aside, the kind of thing a wordsmith would say. This, for example: “Bedclothes: what a beautiful, mysterious word. No other furniture wears clothing.” And this: “The least appetizing words in the world concern English food: salad cream, baps, butties, carvery, goujons.” (Autocorrect truly doesn’t know what to do with half these words! Me, I’m saving them for Scrabble and Lexulous.)
I must seek out McCracken's other books. And look up what baps, butties, and goujons are.
October 16, 2022
I really really wanted to love this book like so many of my fellow readers did, but unfortunately, this one didn’t quite work out for me. Don’t get me wrong — Elizabeth McCracken is a great writer and her ability to use humor in the cleverest of ways is one of the things that I appreciate most about her works (this book was no exception). I also found the premise of the story very touching, with McCracken’s indirect tribute to her mother through the narrator’s recounting of her her memories (though of course, as McCracken makes clear, this is not a memoir, and the narrator, though also a writer who shares other similar details with herself, is technically not her). Having said that, the story overall was a bit hard to follow, as there wasn’t much of a plot — it was mostly the narrator’s thoughts and memories that would jump back and forth from past to present. It actually got to the point where I would be halfway through the book and have no idea what I just read. There were also moments where I had to stop reading in order to attend to a life issue, but then afterwards, I didn’t really feel like picking the book back up again (though of course, I eventually did pick it up and finish, since I have a problem with DNFing books once I start them).
While overall I was glad to have read this — and there were certainly aspects I related to and appreciated, such as the narrator’s complicated relationship with her mother and also trying to reconcile that with her sensibilities as a writer (hence the struggle of whether to actually write about her mother or not) — the back and forth was a bit too much for me. At times, the story felt like it was all over the place and that ended up detracting from the emotional aspect a bit.
Even though this one fell a little short for me, I’m still interested in reading McCracken’s other works at some point and having a different reading experience.
Received ARC from Ecco Press via NetGalley.
While overall I was glad to have read this — and there were certainly aspects I related to and appreciated, such as the narrator’s complicated relationship with her mother and also trying to reconcile that with her sensibilities as a writer (hence the struggle of whether to actually write about her mother or not) — the back and forth was a bit too much for me. At times, the story felt like it was all over the place and that ended up detracting from the emotional aspect a bit.
Even though this one fell a little short for me, I’m still interested in reading McCracken’s other works at some point and having a different reading experience.
Received ARC from Ecco Press via NetGalley.
September 18, 2022
My mother’s body was just her body….I can say that I don’t think it made much of a difference in my childhood.
from The Hero of This Book by Elizabeth McCracken
My mother was diagnosed with psoriasis at age sixteen. By the time she was twenty-seven she had lost joints to psoriatic arthritis. During my teenage years, the psoriasis sometimes covered 90% of her body, and winter often found her bedridden.
Mom asked me later in life if I had been embarrassed by her when growing up. I never saw her disease as ‘her’. As a girl, I knew my mom was the youngest and prettiest of all my girlfriends’ moms, with fashionable hair, red lipstick, her face unlined. My friends all liked her. She taught us to jitterbug. She listened to popular music and liked the latest fashions. I could answer, no, I was never embarrassed by my mom’s disease. Even thought I applied tar ointment or olive oil to her scalp to soak overnight, opened jars she could not grasp, I didn’t see her disability. I saw the mother who read late into the night, argued with neighbors over political issue, her generosity, her stubbornness.
“Her body was her body. It wasn’t something to overcome or accept any more than yours was,” the narrator tells us about her mother whose ability to walk was stolen by disease and bad operations. The Hero of This Book is the narrator’s story of her mother, a strong willed, brilliant, flawed, eccentric woman.
She did not let her disease limit her. When invited to a meeting she was told she was the only disabled person to have ever attended. There were elevators inside, she explained, but she had to crawl up the stairs to the building on her hands and knees. The daughter recalls their trips to the movies and the theater and abroad. She also contends with her deceased parent’s home; they were hoarders and neither able or willing to clean the house. Fiercely private, they resented in home care.
Reading, my mind returned again and again to my own mother, who died in 1991 at age fifty-seven of cancer.
Mom often told me she did not want to live into an old age that found her unable to care for herself. Luckily, her last decade was better with an immunosuppressant drug. Her skin condition improved and the joint damage stabilized, although her fingers were already bent and her neck frozen into a permanent hunch. Her life had been one doctor and experimental treatment after another, interns coming in to see her unusual case.
“Mom didn’t want people to see her dead body as she had so little privacy in life,” McCracken’s narrator tells us. And its exactly what my mom told me. When mom died in the hospital, I arrived to see family gathered in her room, crying. She was already gone. And I remembered her words and wanted to tell them to leave! Leave her alone!
The narrator is a writer, not a mother, single, middle-aged. She talks about her life and her relationship to her mother, about her father and about his relationship to her mother. She refers to the complicated world we live in, “monsters everywhere, with terrible hair and red neckties.” About teaching and writing.
McCracken’s book is a quiet read, with subtle humor and subtle pathos. It’s introspective, thoughtful. As I got into it, I found myself identifying more and more with the narrator. Loss is universal, coming to terms with the loss of a parent shared by us all. The details differ, but not the task of learning to cope with the loss.
“I wish I could remember all the stories she told about herself,” the narrator tells us. Don’t we all.
I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.
from The Hero of This Book by Elizabeth McCracken
My mother was diagnosed with psoriasis at age sixteen. By the time she was twenty-seven she had lost joints to psoriatic arthritis. During my teenage years, the psoriasis sometimes covered 90% of her body, and winter often found her bedridden.
Mom asked me later in life if I had been embarrassed by her when growing up. I never saw her disease as ‘her’. As a girl, I knew my mom was the youngest and prettiest of all my girlfriends’ moms, with fashionable hair, red lipstick, her face unlined. My friends all liked her. She taught us to jitterbug. She listened to popular music and liked the latest fashions. I could answer, no, I was never embarrassed by my mom’s disease. Even thought I applied tar ointment or olive oil to her scalp to soak overnight, opened jars she could not grasp, I didn’t see her disability. I saw the mother who read late into the night, argued with neighbors over political issue, her generosity, her stubbornness.
“Her body was her body. It wasn’t something to overcome or accept any more than yours was,” the narrator tells us about her mother whose ability to walk was stolen by disease and bad operations. The Hero of This Book is the narrator’s story of her mother, a strong willed, brilliant, flawed, eccentric woman.
She did not let her disease limit her. When invited to a meeting she was told she was the only disabled person to have ever attended. There were elevators inside, she explained, but she had to crawl up the stairs to the building on her hands and knees. The daughter recalls their trips to the movies and the theater and abroad. She also contends with her deceased parent’s home; they were hoarders and neither able or willing to clean the house. Fiercely private, they resented in home care.
Reading, my mind returned again and again to my own mother, who died in 1991 at age fifty-seven of cancer.
Mom often told me she did not want to live into an old age that found her unable to care for herself. Luckily, her last decade was better with an immunosuppressant drug. Her skin condition improved and the joint damage stabilized, although her fingers were already bent and her neck frozen into a permanent hunch. Her life had been one doctor and experimental treatment after another, interns coming in to see her unusual case.
“Mom didn’t want people to see her dead body as she had so little privacy in life,” McCracken’s narrator tells us. And its exactly what my mom told me. When mom died in the hospital, I arrived to see family gathered in her room, crying. She was already gone. And I remembered her words and wanted to tell them to leave! Leave her alone!
The narrator is a writer, not a mother, single, middle-aged. She talks about her life and her relationship to her mother, about her father and about his relationship to her mother. She refers to the complicated world we live in, “monsters everywhere, with terrible hair and red neckties.” About teaching and writing.
McCracken’s book is a quiet read, with subtle humor and subtle pathos. It’s introspective, thoughtful. As I got into it, I found myself identifying more and more with the narrator. Loss is universal, coming to terms with the loss of a parent shared by us all. The details differ, but not the task of learning to cope with the loss.
“I wish I could remember all the stories she told about herself,” the narrator tells us. Don’t we all.
I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.
May 31, 2025
This book resonated with me. It felt especially personal to listen to the author read her own story.
Elizabeth McCracken describes her parents as a "sight gag" and adds that they were "opposite in every way but their bad habits, which is the secret to a happy marriage and also the makings of a catastrophe."
I loved her creative use of language and her refreshingly different perspective. I've always thought the word 'cupboard' was an odd one, but I hadn't gotten as far as realizing "this is where the cups board."
The phrase - "a little elbow bend of sandwich crust" is another example of creative language - I knew exactly what she meant but I don't remember ever hearing it called that before.
McCracken states that "Life with my mother had trained me to see the world in terms of accessibility and inaccessibility." This is another point at which I felt resonated with the author, as this is where I am at with my own mother.
She ponders - "Is there any feminine mystery greater than the differences between a mother's body and a daughter's? The flat chested generation giving life to the bosomy, the delicate footed to the size thirteen, why does God let it happen? What does it mean?" Yes! I have wondered this also!
I listened with wonder and nodded in agreement, as McCracken states, "I came to understand that your family is the first novel that you know. How did that handsome boy become that blinking uncle? Who's this big hatted lady?"
"In Iowa City I wrote stories about Des Moines and was occasionally told that my characters weren't believable, particularly the ones most like my relatives." This made me laugh!
McCracken describes her mother as having a "weapons grade self-confidence and self definition."
She hates the term "quirky" as "it means that you've decided you don't have to take that person seriously." I always thought of it as an endearing term - I will think differently from now on.
Her mother's "memory for unhappiness and misery was terrible. Maybe she willed this into being and maybe it was neurological, but somehow I have inherited this tendency of all my inheritances it is my favorite, the most useful." This sounds like a real gift.
"My mother's good cheer was an engine that would burn you if you tried to touch it hoping to switch it off." Her mother seems such a strong, stubborn, determined character!
McCracken writes that, "Back then I thought the duty of a parent was to remain a mysterious monolith of love and care. I no longer do, it is impossible one way or the other." This is something I reflect on regularly - how much of ourselves should we reveal to our children - especially grown children?
She "love[s] being a member of an audience. We're all doing the same thing, we didn't prearrange it but here we are and the performance will be different because it's us, exactly us in the seats." I thought a lot about this - I happen to be in the audience of the musical, Sweet Charity, my son was performing in at a theatre in London recently. It was an especially good audience - we were all in good humor and we called out and clapped with enthusiasm!
"My mother had a sweet tooth - a treat tooth," mine too!
Looking at her mother's brain scan, McCracken thinks that her mother wouldn't want her peering into "that exceptional and highly exercised organ with which she did everything she loved. The organ that shaped her body and her entire personality. If I had to look at it, I wished that, like Mrs Darling, I could tidy it up, move away the dark thoughts, see my mother's neverland." This cut me to the quick.
Her mother ate most foods with gusto, but "She was once presented with a piece of toast spread with marmite and she ate it all and when asked how she liked it she said, "I'm not eager to repeat the experience." I laughed - people either love marmite or hate it.
It felt bittersweet to hear that McCracken "only knew the stories [her mother] liked to tell, not the ones she would prefer to forget." I love that she writes about her mother so she doesn't "evanesce."
Elizabeth McCracken describes her parents as a "sight gag" and adds that they were "opposite in every way but their bad habits, which is the secret to a happy marriage and also the makings of a catastrophe."
I loved her creative use of language and her refreshingly different perspective. I've always thought the word 'cupboard' was an odd one, but I hadn't gotten as far as realizing "this is where the cups board."
The phrase - "a little elbow bend of sandwich crust" is another example of creative language - I knew exactly what she meant but I don't remember ever hearing it called that before.
McCracken states that "Life with my mother had trained me to see the world in terms of accessibility and inaccessibility." This is another point at which I felt resonated with the author, as this is where I am at with my own mother.
She ponders - "Is there any feminine mystery greater than the differences between a mother's body and a daughter's? The flat chested generation giving life to the bosomy, the delicate footed to the size thirteen, why does God let it happen? What does it mean?" Yes! I have wondered this also!
I listened with wonder and nodded in agreement, as McCracken states, "I came to understand that your family is the first novel that you know. How did that handsome boy become that blinking uncle? Who's this big hatted lady?"
"In Iowa City I wrote stories about Des Moines and was occasionally told that my characters weren't believable, particularly the ones most like my relatives." This made me laugh!
McCracken describes her mother as having a "weapons grade self-confidence and self definition."
She hates the term "quirky" as "it means that you've decided you don't have to take that person seriously." I always thought of it as an endearing term - I will think differently from now on.
Her mother's "memory for unhappiness and misery was terrible. Maybe she willed this into being and maybe it was neurological, but somehow I have inherited this tendency of all my inheritances it is my favorite, the most useful." This sounds like a real gift.
"My mother's good cheer was an engine that would burn you if you tried to touch it hoping to switch it off." Her mother seems such a strong, stubborn, determined character!
McCracken writes that, "Back then I thought the duty of a parent was to remain a mysterious monolith of love and care. I no longer do, it is impossible one way or the other." This is something I reflect on regularly - how much of ourselves should we reveal to our children - especially grown children?
She "love[s] being a member of an audience. We're all doing the same thing, we didn't prearrange it but here we are and the performance will be different because it's us, exactly us in the seats." I thought a lot about this - I happen to be in the audience of the musical, Sweet Charity, my son was performing in at a theatre in London recently. It was an especially good audience - we were all in good humor and we called out and clapped with enthusiasm!
"My mother had a sweet tooth - a treat tooth," mine too!
Looking at her mother's brain scan, McCracken thinks that her mother wouldn't want her peering into "that exceptional and highly exercised organ with which she did everything she loved. The organ that shaped her body and her entire personality. If I had to look at it, I wished that, like Mrs Darling, I could tidy it up, move away the dark thoughts, see my mother's neverland." This cut me to the quick.
Her mother ate most foods with gusto, but "She was once presented with a piece of toast spread with marmite and she ate it all and when asked how she liked it she said, "I'm not eager to repeat the experience." I laughed - people either love marmite or hate it.
It felt bittersweet to hear that McCracken "only knew the stories [her mother] liked to tell, not the ones she would prefer to forget." I love that she writes about her mother so she doesn't "evanesce."
March 24, 2023
Fiction or not, Elizabeth McCracken has written a lovely homage to her mother and mothers everywhere. We follow along on a recreation of a vacation taken with her mother before her death. It is her way of processing her grief and dealing with the complicated aftermath of losing a parent. Anyone who has lost a beloved parent will find The Hero of this book to be a heartwarming read.
I received a drc from the publisher via NetGalley.
I received a drc from the publisher via NetGalley.
May 28, 2023
one of those books that you read for the writing—the particular flair or slant of the writer themself, their syntax and punctuation choices, what do they well and what they do repetitively—more than the actual premise or content itself. some might think this book a gimmick; as a piece of autofiction, you’ll never know which bits are real and which are invented. that, for me, made the premise more believable, that elizabeth mccracken needed perfect plausible deniability before she could believably grieve her mother before an audience. this is a wandering narrative, prone to detours and interjections, chugging forward in fits and starts, sometimes like a novel and sometimes like a confessional diary entry—that’s why i enjoyed it so much. that, and mccracken’s incisive style. her writing is so utterly itself:
Even now I can only tell you what plot isn’t. It’s not a mysterious animating spirit that lives at the center of fiction, without which a novel or story dies. It isn’t a motor, a mechanical thing, also at the center of the work, also without which the work is dead. It’s as idiosyncratic as anything in fiction: language, character. It belongs to you.
August 19, 2022
This novel is not just clever, but also frequently very funny. For a writer who eschews the basic and the boring, McCracken has a talent for seeing the remarkable in everyday life. I am well glad of the decision (at the last minute) NOT to read this book in the library. My laughter, which even though it tends toward the soundless "can't breathe" kind of manifestation, would surely have been a distraction for all the patrons assembled. For instance, the title of this "not a memoir" memoir could have been THE RIVER THAMES IS FULL OF TEETH, but maybe that's too undignified. I did ruminate on the concept a bit too long, perhaps. We all have our favorite lines from books, and most of them are paraphrased, just like my alt title suggestion.
The author demonstrates deftly the tender playfulness this style of narrative can engender, and how it might spark random memories and inspire resonance in each reader. We think perhaps our mothers would have understood the author's mother on one level or another, and by extension, we the readers, feel more seen and known.
Thank you to Ecco Publishers and #NetGalley for an advance reader's e-proof of this book.
The author demonstrates deftly the tender playfulness this style of narrative can engender, and how it might spark random memories and inspire resonance in each reader. We think perhaps our mothers would have understood the author's mother on one level or another, and by extension, we the readers, feel more seen and known.
Thank you to Ecco Publishers and #NetGalley for an advance reader's e-proof of this book.
August 29, 2022
This book reads like a memoir, but the narrator denied it. The narrator is unnames throughout. We know she is a writer, a middle-aged female who has recently lost here mother. Her mother seems to be someone the narrator had a great deal of admiration and respect for and love. The narrator has taken a trip to London and she is reminiscing about her mother, the time they came to London together, how her mother handled her challenging body, things they had done together and with her father and grandmother. It deals with the narrator working through her grief. The entire book.
This was slow to start, but it drew me in after awhile as I got used to the writing style and I started to enjoy reading about the relationship between the narrator and her mother. Some of the excerpts were interesting. The writing was just a rambling montage, but it fit the purpose. I've rated it three stars because sometimes I was bored, but sometimes I enjoyed the memories. I still think it's at least partially a memoir.
Thanks to Ecco through Netgalley for an advance copy. This book will be published on October 4, 2022.
This was slow to start, but it drew me in after awhile as I got used to the writing style and I started to enjoy reading about the relationship between the narrator and her mother. Some of the excerpts were interesting. The writing was just a rambling montage, but it fit the purpose. I've rated it three stars because sometimes I was bored, but sometimes I enjoyed the memories. I still think it's at least partially a memoir.
Thanks to Ecco through Netgalley for an advance copy. This book will be published on October 4, 2022.
September 21, 2022
This is a genre- bending novel that plays with the form of memoir, fiction, and the "writing life". Although, I believed we are being asked to suspend our urge to categorize and just let it be. This is the narrator (author's?) reflection on her relationship with her mom, who has passed, and she is on a trip to London, a place where they had travelled together. On this trip, alone, her mom is a huge presence. She recounts her memories of her mom, a person with physical disabilities, and how she navigated life despite them. She also meditates on her experiences as a writer, and the actual craft of writing a novel, a memoir, or non-fiction short stories, whatever you choose to call them. Her writing is vivid and eclectic rounded out with touching insights on grief. I enjoyed the glimpse of the interesting lives of these characters wrapped in layers of heartache and humor.
Thank you to Goodreads Giveaways and HarperCollins for the ARC of this enlightening book.
Thank you to Goodreads Giveaways and HarperCollins for the ARC of this enlightening book.
January 25, 2025
I think this is one of those books where your reaction to it will simply depend upon your own experience with grief and the loss of those who raised you and made you
October 31, 2022
At one point in her newest book (is it a memoir? is it fiction?), Elizabeth McCracken writes this: “We all have our memories, and a memoir is one person’s. What is the difference between a novel and a memoir? I couldn’t tell you. Permission to lie, permission to cast aside worries about plausibility.”
When writing about one’s mother – which, to most people, is a story based on fact but front-loaded with mythologies and misrepresentations by the very nature of our most-intimate relationship – it is hard to separate fact and fiction.
Ms. McCracken understands the fierce privacy with which her mother shielded herself. Writing about her is an act of extraordinary love (“Why are you writing about me? Because otherwise, you’d evanesce, and that I cannot bear.”) But it is also an act of betrayal to a mother who never wanted to be the character of a book.
Here, she is not just a character. She is a hero. Elizabeth McCracken solves her dilemma by introducing a fictional hotel clerk and changing some of her own biography (in real life she is married, not single, for example). She adds in for good measure, “You family is the first novel that you know.”
Through this novel, she performs the magic trick of bringing her mother alive – tiny in stature, disabled and Jewish in small-town Iowa, disabled by cerebral palsy at birth and relying on canes to walk, a major hoarder and a lover of theater, a fiery and sometimes cranky personality. This is not a vengeful book about a daughter revealing her mother’s flaws. It is, instead, a layered book of a unique woman who made an oversized impact on her daughter’s life.
At the end of the day, it’s a book about how we grieve. How we write. Why we write (…to get human beings on the page without the use of vivisection or preservatives or a spiritualist’s props.) And ultimately, how we continue to remember and love.
When writing about one’s mother – which, to most people, is a story based on fact but front-loaded with mythologies and misrepresentations by the very nature of our most-intimate relationship – it is hard to separate fact and fiction.
Ms. McCracken understands the fierce privacy with which her mother shielded herself. Writing about her is an act of extraordinary love (“Why are you writing about me? Because otherwise, you’d evanesce, and that I cannot bear.”) But it is also an act of betrayal to a mother who never wanted to be the character of a book.
Here, she is not just a character. She is a hero. Elizabeth McCracken solves her dilemma by introducing a fictional hotel clerk and changing some of her own biography (in real life she is married, not single, for example). She adds in for good measure, “You family is the first novel that you know.”
Through this novel, she performs the magic trick of bringing her mother alive – tiny in stature, disabled and Jewish in small-town Iowa, disabled by cerebral palsy at birth and relying on canes to walk, a major hoarder and a lover of theater, a fiery and sometimes cranky personality. This is not a vengeful book about a daughter revealing her mother’s flaws. It is, instead, a layered book of a unique woman who made an oversized impact on her daughter’s life.
At the end of the day, it’s a book about how we grieve. How we write. Why we write (…to get human beings on the page without the use of vivisection or preservatives or a spiritualist’s props.) And ultimately, how we continue to remember and love.
August 6, 2023
Oh, Elizabeth McCracken, how you make my heart sing, sometimes a jazzy riff, sometimes a blues, sometimes a Bach chorale!
I read this for a reading group. Most of us loved it, a couple members didn't get it at all.
Elizabeth, don't worry about whether this is a memoir or fiction. I don't care. You honor your mother, you make a disabled person visible with all her struggles but most of all her triumphs. You are a good daughter.
Those readers who get what you do in your books are lucky to have you on our shelves.
I read this for a reading group. Most of us loved it, a couple members didn't get it at all.
Elizabeth, don't worry about whether this is a memoir or fiction. I don't care. You honor your mother, you make a disabled person visible with all her struggles but most of all her triumphs. You are a good daughter.
Those readers who get what you do in your books are lucky to have you on our shelves.
November 15, 2022
A blend of fiction and memoir (but how much of the book fits into which category? Only McCracken herself knows... though my guess is that the book contains a lot more of the latter than the former), this was a perfect fit for my reading mood when I picked it up: the protagonist visits London and reflects on the time she visited the city with her mother (who has since passed away), which serves as a jumping off point for her to mull over her relationship with her mother throughout her life. The book reminded me of another recentish read, Cold Enough for Snow, in its themes - though the tone of the two books are rather different.
Must read more of her books (The Souvenir Museum was fun), perhaps I'll give An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination a go next.
Must read more of her books (The Souvenir Museum was fun), perhaps I'll give An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination a go next.
April 9, 2023
This book's brilliance lies in its ability to unsettle the reader: It is fiction? Is it memoir? Why do we care? What is inherent in our nature that we need to categorize an exterior thing in order to understand our interior reaction to it? And in this very way, Elizabeth McCracken challenges the reader to examine her expectations of what makes a story.
This is a book about grief and yet it is playful and wry. McCracken's protagonist, a woman who travels alone to London to trace the steps of one of the last happy times with her recently-deceased mother, is, like the author, a writer. She adroitly catalogues details as she travels through the city, giving this a Mrs. Dalloway energy of consciousness, rather than an unfolding of a plot.
I know much of why I adored and connected to the slim, punchy, resonant read is the narrator's musings on writing, a meta-meditation on storytelling. But the novel transcends an insider's tale of her craft and muses on the universality of a child's relationship to her mother and the tumult of emotions that follow when the physical mother is gone but the emotional bond remains.
Lovely and expansive. Highly recommended.
This is a book about grief and yet it is playful and wry. McCracken's protagonist, a woman who travels alone to London to trace the steps of one of the last happy times with her recently-deceased mother, is, like the author, a writer. She adroitly catalogues details as she travels through the city, giving this a Mrs. Dalloway energy of consciousness, rather than an unfolding of a plot.
I know much of why I adored and connected to the slim, punchy, resonant read is the narrator's musings on writing, a meta-meditation on storytelling. But the novel transcends an insider's tale of her craft and muses on the universality of a child's relationship to her mother and the tumult of emotions that follow when the physical mother is gone but the emotional bond remains.
Lovely and expansive. Highly recommended.
January 26, 2023
A memoir, but then again, McCracken says it’s not. A fictionalised memoir then perhaps? I liked it, but after just having finished Bret Easton Ellis’s ‘The Shards’ I had some trouble with really loving this evenly paced, tender ‘novel.’
January 11, 2023
Read in her own voice, Elizabeth McCracken weaves a testament and recognition of her very special mother, a woman who is ordinary but special in many ways, and although she calls this a novel, it is too close to the mark to be merely fabrication.
October 21, 2023
I'm not sure what to say about this one. It fell a little flat for me. Jumbled, random memories of her mother that never really jelled into a true memoir, which the author claims was fiction instead. Still, I continued to the end, don't resent the time spent reading, but at the same time, happy to move on.
January 11, 2024
I can think of a couple of authors who suffered greatly after their memoirs were exposed as fiction. It’s a blurry line. The narrator says (repeatedly) that this book is a novel so I’ll take her at her word. I know for sure that it’s a lovely remembrance of a woman’s mother.
September 26, 2023
This short, quirky, and diverting book is a memoir/novel. Or the author pitches it that way. Once I got with the swing of things, I enjoyed reading it. She has a dry sense of humor, which I found amusing. She writes about her parents, especially her mother. Worth a read.
January 13, 2024
I just loved this book. Written in the most wonderfully crafted snarky style. In the course of this sort of auto-fiction, the author talks about an experience in a creative writing course, when she defines a piece of work she produces as "a non-fiction short story" and to my mind this is exactly what this "novel" is. This ambivalence is what makes is it so brilliant, a mutation between what is personal and what is fictional.
As our narrator, Natalie, re-visits London she reminisces about her eccentric Jewish mother who has defined her life and outlook.
I smiled, I laughed, I recognised as I devoured it....My first read by this author and I am already seeking out more of her work.
As our narrator, Natalie, re-visits London she reminisces about her eccentric Jewish mother who has defined her life and outlook.
I smiled, I laughed, I recognised as I devoured it....My first read by this author and I am already seeking out more of her work.
January 24, 2024
My mother is not much like McCracken's mother, not least because she is alive (spit three times, knock wood, touch iron, and so forth). But I thought of her the whole time I was listening to this lovely heartwrenching book because in telling this very specific sort of autofiction sort of memoir story about her very unique mother, McCracken captures something universal about being a middle-aged woman with an adored aging mother. I don't really know how to explain why I loved this book so much - except that McCracken writes exceedingly well, and that it is about loving your one and only mother, eccentricities and all.
dnf
September 18, 2022Dnf at 50%
December 25, 2022
Talvez eu mude a nota no futuro... Foi um livro que me fez pensar sobre diferentes aspectos narrativos e a autora usar alguns artifícios bem interessantes. Mas ainda assim não sei se ela foi revolucionária ou apenas inteligente.
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