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This title in other formats:An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoirby Elizabeth McCracken
Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:"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. Review:"In this stunning memoir of the death in utero of her first child only days before his birth, McCracken has succeeded in writing a beautiful, precise and heartbreaking account without sentimentality or pity. McCracken, whose first novel, The Giant's House, was a National Book Award finalist, writes that at 35 she was prepared to stay a spinster, 'the weird aunt, the oddball friend,' until she met and married Edward. She became pregnant, and while they were living in an old farmhouse in France they passed over two doctors to select a midwife to deliver 'Pudding' in the hospital in Bordeaux. Woven in with the story is the aftermath of his death, the reality of telling the people close to her what happened, and how she and Edward were able to go on. 'I felt so ruined by life that I couldn't imagine it ever getting worse,' she writes, deciding that if there is a God, 'the proof of His existence is black humor,' which she uses memorably to tell her story. She later writes of the emotions surrounding her second pregnancy and birth, this time in upstate New York. (That she gives birth to a second child, also a boy, makes it possible for readers to absorb the sadness of her loss.) She lends her narrative a spontaneous feel, as if she's telling as she remembers, making her account all the more personal. In the end, it is a triumph of her will and her writing that she has turned her tragedy into a literary gift. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review:Some friends and I used to call ourselves "The Dead Babies Club." We would meet for brunch and talk about our losses — miscarriages, stillbirths, terminations after amnios revealed acute abnormalities. We may have been a grief-stricken lot, but we weren't going to be a silent one: We wanted to be seen, to be acknowledged, to mark these events that didn't exactly make us mothers, but made us ... something.... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) Review:"McCracken manages to limn her poignant story with touches of humor, empathy toward those who struggled to express their awkward sympathy, and, ultimately, hope, in the form of the baby asleep in her lap as she types, one-handed." Booklist Review:"[McCracken] applies honesty, wisdom and even wit to a painful event." New York Times Review:"This is an intimate book....It is also a wildly important book — we do not live alongside the dead the way we ought to: We sweep them off to the margins as quickly as possible." Los Angeles Times Review:"This is not a book about the lighter side of losing a child, it never seeks to trivialize her loss, but it does show how honesty and humor can help people survive grief." San Francisco Chronicle Review:"The book 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 Review:"Some readers shy away from books like this. I have been told about my own memoir that it is too hard to read. But I urge people to read McCracken's book, and other books that help all of us navigate life and the things it throws at us." Ann Hood, Providence Journal Review:"[McCracken's] devastating black humor punctuates the narrative." Minneapolis Star Tribune Review:"There's a finely tuned tension between romanticism and realism in her personality and prose." San Diego Union-Tribune About the AuthorElizabeth 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, a collection of stories. 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. What Our Readers Are SayingAdd a comment for a chance to win!
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