An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir

by Elizabeth McCracken

Overview

"This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending," writes Elizabeth McCracken in her powerful, inspiring memoir. A prize-winning, successful novelist in her 30s, McCracken was happy to be an itinerant writer and self-proclaimed spinster. But suddenly she fell in love, got married, and two years ago was living in a remote part of France, working on her novel, and waiting for the birth of her first child.
This book is about what happened next. In her ninth month of pregnancy, she learned that her baby boy had died. How do you deal with and recover from this kind of loss? Of course you don't—but you go on. And if you have ever experienced loss or love someone who has, the company of this remarkable book will help you go on.
With humor and warmth and unfailing generosity, McCracken considers the nature of love and grief. She opens her heart and leaves all of ours the richer for it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316027663
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	02/22/2010
Pages:	184
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Elizabeth McCracken is the author of The Giant's House, which was nominated for the National Book Award; Niagara Falls All Over Again, winner of the PEN/Winship Award; and Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry. She has received grants and awards from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Academy in Berlin.

Editorial Reviews

"This is an intimate book....It is also a wildly important book."

Los Angeles Times

"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."

Boston Globe

"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."

Washington Post

A fascinating, word-perfect and bittersweet memoir.
— Miami Herald

Elinor Lipman

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

Lev Grossman

"A fascinating, word-perfect and bittersweet memoir."

Elinor Lipman - Miami Herald

"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

"... 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

"... 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

"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."

Lev Grossman - Time

"Stunning...it is a triumph of her will and her writing that she has turned her tragedy into a literary gift."

PW (Starred Review)

"This is an intimate book....It is also a wildly important book.

—Los Angeles Times

"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."—Boston Globe

"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."—Washington Post

"... 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."—Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon

"A fascinating, word-perfect and bittersweet memoir."—Elinor Lipman, Miami Herald

"What an extraordinary book - joy and sorrow all mixed together on every page. Elizabeth McCracken is amazing."—Mameve Medwed, author of Of Men and Their Mothers

"... 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."—Mark Doty, author of Dog Years

"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."—Lev Grossman, Time

"Stunning...it is a triumph of her will and her writing that she has turned her tragedy into a literary gift."—PW (Starred Review)

From the Publisher

"This is an intimate book....It is also a wildly important book."

Los Angeles Times

"[A] fascinating, word-perfect and bittersweet memoir."
— Miami Herald

Elinor Lipman

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.
—The New York Times

Lucinda Rosenfeld

…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.
—The Washington Post

Peggy Orenstein

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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Publishers Weekly

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.

Kirkus Reviews

"McCracken uses the brief length (4 1/2 hours of playing time) of her memoir to plumb deeply into her feelings of guilt and inadequacy....Alternately brittle and defiant, McCracken comes to her own terms with her ill-fated son..."

The News & Advance