An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

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.G. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

Starred review from October 27, 2008
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).

Starred review from July 7, 2008
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.

August 1, 2008
McCracken, author of The Giants House (1997), aNational Book Award finalist, calls her astonishingly candid memoir the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending. Whenshe and her husband Edward were nearing the end of a 2006 writing sojourn in southern France, and she was in the ninth month of her pregnancy, her unborn baby boydied. Now teaching in upstate New York, and raising her second child, McCracken says she wasnt ready for her first to fade into historyhence, this therapeutic memoir. In amazingly insightful chapters, she shares her acutely sensitive thoughts about how she and Edward dealt with their initial grief, how friends and family coped, where the couple placed their futile blame, if any, and the emotional strings attached to their decision to attempt a pregnancy so soon after this tragedy. McCracken manages to limn her poignant story with touches of humor, empathy toward those whostruggledto express their awkward sympathy, and, ultimately, hope, in the form of the baby asleep in her lap as she types, one-handed.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)