Review: The Hero of This Book by Elizabeth McCracken

 

The narrator of The Hero of This Book insists that it is not a memoir, that it is instead a novel, or perhaps it is something called a fictional memoir (but don't most experienced memoir readers already know that memoirs, based as they are on memory and perception, are all likely to be fictional to one degree or another?). Call it what you will. I can't help but believe this is a thinly disguised memoir of McCracken's own mother, "the hero" of this book.

McCracken certainly gives enough clues along the way, including these:

"My mother distrusted memoirs and I wasn't interested in the autobiographical and for a long time that made things easy. But writers change even if mothers don't.

(Mothers change plenty. Don't trust a writer who gives out advice. Writers are suckers for pretty turns of phrase with only the ring of truth." 

 and

"If you want to write a memoir without writing a memoir, go ahead and call it something else. Let other people argue about it. Arguing with yourself or the dead will get you nowhere."

and

"(I've heard some memoirists say that they don't worry whether their renditions of people are 'fair,' since there is no fair: We all have our own memories, and a memoir is one person's. What's the difference between a novel and a memoir? I couldn't tell you. Permission to lie; permission to cast aside worries about plausibility.)"

and, finally, this

"The dead have no privacy left, is what I've decided. Somebody else  might decide otherwise, that the only thing the dead have left is privacy. Anyhow, here in this book, I am writing about the dead and the fictional, and not the living and the actual, whom I love, and whom I will leave alone."

And it can be no accident that the one and only footnote in the entire book appears near the very end and reads simply: "Natalie Jacobson McCracken, 1935-2018."

So, back to the novel in which our fictional narrator takes a solo journey to London some ten months after the death of her mother. While there she revisits many of the same spots she and her mother enjoyed together on a previous trip. This, of course, allows the narrator to make comparisons between the two experiences while exploring her mother's past in relation to their mother-daughter bond. 

As it turns out, the fictional author/narrator reveals as much about herself as about her mother, but by the end of this rather beautiful little book, it becomes clear why her mother is absolutely "the hero of this book." I enjoyed The Hero of This Book a lot, and had to keep reminding myself that I was supposed be calling it a novel and not a memoir. I enjoyed it almost as much because of all the "writing" tips and admissions that the narrator includes, but the most surprising thing is that I walk away from The Hero of This Book with the feeling that I truly know and understand Elizabeth McCracken's mother to a depth that may not have been possible in a "real" memoir.

Elizabeth McCracken (book jacket photo)