Elizabeth McCracken has called this memoir "the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending," but it is far more than that. It is the story of a great love and a numbing loss. When McCracken met British novelist Edward Carey, she was a successful, prizewinning novelist without romantic plans. They swept each other away, got married, moved to France, and prepared for the birth of their first child. Then, in the final month of Elizabeth's pregnancy, the baby died. Crushed yet sustained by their love, the couple wrestled with the sudden vacancy in their lives. Written with the sensitivity and nuance of her novels and short stories, McCracken's An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination soothes an ache even as it expresses it.
If a book's merit were measured in subway stops accidentally bypassed while being read, the novelist Elizabeth McCracken's affecting memoir about having a stillborn baby would rank high: I found myself three stations past my destination before I realized I'd missed it. No doubt my forgetfulness had something to do with bringing my own maternal history to bear on McCracken's—my first child, too, stopped kicking on her due date—but the author also applies honesty, wisdom and even wit to a painful event.
…in her lovely, crystalline meditation on the nature of grief, motherhood, marriage and France—a memoir occasioned by the stillbirth of her first son—she opens with a quip: "Once upon a time, before I knew anything about the subject, a woman told me that I should write a book about the lighter side of losing a child." See, she seems to be saying, this won't be so bad. What's more, she reassures us, a healthy infant lies on her lap as she writes. I hope those signposts are enough to ameliorate readers' aversion to the subject matter, the excuse that the book isn't for them unless they, too, have borne a dead child. After all, you don't have to be an alcoholic to love Caroline Knapp's Drinking: A Love Story. Nor do you have to have lost your jaw to cancer to appreciate Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face. The best memoirs transcend their particulars, offer a fresh look at the bumpy terrain of sorrow, love, youthful folly, aged folly, resilience and selfhood. McCracken's is one of those, and it would be a shame to pass it by because it strikes at one's deepest fears.
McCracken tells her own story in this touching and often unexpectedly funny memoir about her life before and after losing her first child in the ninth month of pregnancy. As difficult as it must have been to read aloud, McCracken's delivery is courageous and never self-pitying. McCracken is forthright about the tragedy, telling the listener early on that a baby dies in this book, but that another one is born. McCracken's reading is enthralling and deeply moving, as if she is relating this intimate journey directly to each listener individually from a dark, candle-lit room, in an unforgettable performance. A Little, Brown hardcover (reviewed online). (Sept.)
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Novelist McCracken (Niagara Falls All Over Again, 2001, etc.) relates her struggle to deal with the tragedy of a stillborn son. She begins with a bizarre comment from a fan who suggested, years before the author miscarried, that she ought to write a book "about the lighter side of losing a child." McCracken continually revisits this comment in a memoir as slim and piercing as a stiletto. She gradually reveals the horrors of her experience, peeling back layers of memories to reach the most haunting one: delivering her son two days after she learned that he was dead. In a series of artful vignettes, the author staggers rather than glides through her story. Quick, sometimes painful glimpses delineate her adored husband, her writing career, friends who did the right thing and friends who didn't. McCracken and her English spouse were living in rural France during her first pregnancy. They playfully called the fetus Pudding, "for some complicated, funny-only-to-the-progenitors reason." They visited several doctors, none terribly satisfactory, and so decided to have a midwife deliver. Immediately following the baby's death on April 27, 2006, they burned much of what they'd bought for their son and fled to England, then to America, where she had a teaching position waiting. Just a few months later they learned she was pregnant again, and the couple again bounced from one doctor to another until they found a woman they loved. Their son Gus was born one year and five days after they lost Pudding. Through it all, McCracken struggled to write and to forgive herself. "Closure is bullshit," she declares, but her memoir shows her achieving a sort of peace, though never a mindless tranquility.Notable for its spare, intense prose and the author's self-deprecating frankness about her failures as well as those of her loved ones.
"This is an intimate book....It is also a wildly important book ." —Los Angeles Times Boston Globe Washington Post Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon Elinor Lipman , Miami Herald Mameve Medwed, author of Of Men and Their Mothers Mark Doty, author of Dog Years The Year of Magical Thinking : it's hard to imagine two more rigorous, unsentimental guides to enduring the very bottom of the scale of human emotion."—Lev Grossman , Time PW (Starred Review)
"Reading it is a mysteriously enlarging experience. It could pair neatly with Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking : it's hard to imagine two more rigorous, unsentimental guides to enduring the very bottom of the scale of human emotion."
"... McCracken writes with such clarity and immediacy ...a writer who rises to the human complexity of grief with all her powers, and all her heart."
author of Dog Years Mark Doty
"What an extraordinary book - joy and sorrow all mixed together on every page. Elizabeth McCracken is amazing."
author of Of Men and Their Mothers Mameve Medwed
"A fascinating, word-perfect and bittersweet memoir."
Elinor Lipman - Miami Herald
"... Elizabeth McCracken does not howl out her loss. She is devastatingly calm and in this matches measure for measure her own fine writing. By the end of this memoir you will have held a beautiful child in your hands and you will have acknowledged him. This book is an extraordinary gift to us all."
author of The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon Alice Sebold
"The best memoirs transcend their particulars, offer a fresh look at the bumpy terrain of sorrow, love,
"A beautifully written book....It is, on the one hand, an incisive look at grief and the terrible weight of memory. But it's also a love story-a paean to McCracken's husband and both of their children."
"This is an intimate book....It is also a wildly important book ."
"Stunning...it is a triumph of her will and her writing that she has turned her tragedy into a literary gift."
Reading it is a mysteriously enlarging experience. It could pair neatly with Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking : it's hard to imagine two more rigorous, unsentimental guides to enduring the very bottom of the scale of human emotion.Time
A fascinating, word-perfect and bittersweet memoir.Miami Herald
At first glance, a mother's memoir of the stillborn child she lost at the end stages of pregnancy might seem to be an unbearably heavy listen. But Elizabeth McCracken's poignant story of love and loss, written as a tribute to the lost child and as a catharsis for her and her husband, evokes with its simultaneously tender prose and dark sense of humor the hopes and grief of a couple that has suffered the unthinkable. McCracken narrates her own story with a sort of quiet resolve, emotions not on full display in her voice but at the same time easily discernible just beneath a thin veneer of composure. Listeners will feel the mixture of joy and sadness in her understated performance. S.E.G. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
DECEMBER 2008 - AudioFile
