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Summary
Summary
Named a Top Ten Best Book of the Year by Time and People
Named a Best Book of the Year by: Washington Post * Kirkus Reviews * New Yorker * Chicago Public Library * NPR * Oprah Daily * Philadelphia Enquirer
A taut, groundbreaking new novel from bestselling and award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken, about a writer's relationship with her larger-than-life mother--and about the very nature of writing, memory, and art
Ten months after her mother's death, the narrator of The Hero of This Book takes a trip to London. The city was a favorite of her mother's, and as the narrator wanders the streets, she finds herself reflecting on her mother's life and their relationship. Thoughts of the past meld with questions of the future: Back in New England, the family home is now up for sale, its considerable contents already winnowed.
The woman, a writer, recalls all that made her complicated mother extraordinary--her brilliant wit, her generosity, her unbelievable obstinacy, her sheer will in seizing life despite physical difficulties--and finds herself wondering how her mother had endured. Even though she wants to respect her mother's nearly pathological sense of privacy, the woman must come to terms with whether making a chronicle of this remarkable life constitutes an act of love or betrayal.
The Hero of This Book is a searing examination of grief and renewal, and of a deeply felt relationship between a child and her parents. What begins as a question of filial devotion ultimately becomes a lesson in what it means to write. At once comic and heartbreaking, with prose that delights at every turn, this is a novel of such piercing love and tenderness that we are reminded that art is what remains when all else falls away.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
McCracken (The Souvenir Museum) blurs fiction and memoir with a mischievous and loving portrait of her late mother. The unnamed narrator dislikes memoirs, and her mother, Natalie, whom she revered, "distrusted" them. So the narrator turns to fiction, claiming that all it takes to leap from the dreaded realm of grief memoirs is to make a few things up, such as the desk clerk at the London hotel she checks in to in 2019, a year after Natalie's death, to sort through her thoughts and feelings. Despite her avowed opposition to memoir, she unleashes a flood of details about Natalie while wandering around London, describing how the short Jewish woman's cerebral palsy made walking a struggle, and how she had to cultivate a stubborn nature to ignore the "muttering" of those who doubted her potential. (She ended up a beloved magazine editor in Boston.) The narrator lists a few made-up details that diverge from McCracken's own life: "the fictional me is unmarried, an only child, childless," and she notes how novelists are free to kill off characters as needed. What emerges alongside this love letter to the restive Natalie is an engaging character study of a narrator who views everything through the lens of fiction ("Your family is the first novel that you know"). It's a refreshing outing, and one that sees McCracken gleefully shatter genre lines. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (Oct.)
Guardian Review
Reproduced on the first page of Elizabeth McCracken's new novel there is a photograph. It shows a dedication scrawled in the front of her first book, Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry. "For Mom," it reads, "whose life history I will continue to mine, but who will never - no matter what she or anybody else thinks - appear as a character in my work, being too good for the likes of one of my characters." The grieving narrator crosses the Millennium Bridge, looks at the Rothkos in Tate Modern, drinks a 10.30am prosecco The unnamed narrator of The Hero of This Book has recently lost her mother, Natalie. ("I apologise if you hate such narrators and such novels," the narrator writes, not very apologetically. "We have this in common. I hate novels with unnamed narrators. I didn't mean to write one.") It is 2019, "the summer before the world stopped", and she is visiting London alone. As she walks around the city, a place her mother loved and which they had visited together three years earlier, everything reminds her of Natalie. She crosses the Millennium Bridge, looks at the Rothkos in Tate Modern, drinks a 10.30am prosecco in the cafe. Meanwhile her memories loop round on each other: some recent, some so old as to have become part of the family mythology. In fragments alternately profound and mundane (and, this being McCracken, often both at the same time), they summon her clever, wilful, witty, opinionated, indomitable, fiercely private and tirelessly optimistic oddball mother, who was "more fun than anyone I knew". A reader might be forgiven for confusing this Natalie with McCracken's own mother, who also died in 2018. She shares McCracken's mother's family history and her lifelong struggles with mobility, as well as her disapproval of Barbie dolls and bagels cut in half and professional sports, plus her contempt for memoirs, particularly memoirs about parents. ("She liked to quote her favourite New Yorker cartoon, a man on an analyst's couch, saying, 'I had a difficult childhood, especially lately.'") Lucky, then, that The Hero of This Book is absolutely not a memoir. The narrator insists on this from the get-go. "Perhaps you fear writing a memoir, reasonably," she remarks as Trevor, a "gentle, blinky Englishman", checks her into her London hotel. "Invent a single man and call your book a novel. The freedom one fictional man grants you is immeasurable." It is strangely unsettling to be so explicitly assigned to a state of not-knowing, to a story that is neither quite true nor quite made up, where McCracken both is and is not her protagonist. McCracken - or rather the narrator - is unrepentant. "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." Equally she roundly rejects the idea of autofiction, claiming not to know what it means ("though it sounds like something written by a robot, or a kiosk, or a European"). And yet throughout the novel she continues to worry at the question of genre, unable to lay it to rest, impulsively stripping off her fictional costume only to scramble it back on a page later. The result is a shape-shifting hybrid of a book that hedges its bets on every page, playing with its ambivalence in order to explore the equal and opposite compulsions to respect a mother's privacy and to hold on to her through words. It also meditates on how stories are made, and the impossibility of ever truly differentiating fiction from autobiography. "Your family is the first novel that you know." And yet the problem with committing real people to the page, even those closest to us, is how little we can ever really know them. Ideally, the narrator admits, she would write a sprawling whole-life novel about her mother, "David Copperfield except Jewish, and disabled, and female, and an American wiseacre, but there's too much I don't know and I can't bear to make up". In its place we have this, a slim novel that confirms McCracken as among the finest contemporary chroniclers of everyday life. Like Elizabeth Strout and Ann Patchett, she combines a blistering intelligence with deep humanity, finding the universal in the most ordinary of details. She is also laugh-out-loud funny. In fewer than 200 pages, and without an ounce of sentiment, she paints an extraordinarily vivid portrait of an extraordinary - and much beloved - mother. Fictional or not, McCracken's Natalie crackles on every page, always eccentric, sometimes exasperating, occasionally gleefully self-mythologising ("she insisted that she invented the mojito ¿ also somehow children's Tylenol"), entirely and irresistibly real. Only at the very end of this wonderful book does McCracken allow Natalie herself to address the question at its heart. "Why are you writing about me?" she asks the narrator. "Because otherwise you'd evanesce," the narrator replies, "and that I cannot bear." As McCracken knows, the great characters of fiction endure for ever.
Kirkus Review
"Your family is the first novel that you know." Meandering about London in the summer of 2019, 10 months after the death of her mother, McCracken's nameless (maybe!) narrator recounts episodes from her mother's extraordinary life and their quirk-filled family. Like all good stories, it's complicated, and the mother in question was brilliant, stubborn, bad with money, secretive, and oppositional. Yet she was more fun than anyone else her daughter knew. Challenged by daunting physical limitations due to an injury with forceps when she was born, the older woman expended efforts to lead an active and successful life that could be considered heroic. (The achievement of "fun" seems superheroic.) Braided into McCracken's gorgeously spiraling narrative is an expansive meditation on the act of writing and, intriguingly, the art of writing memoir. Beginning with the dedication page (a photograph of an inscription--written in McCracken's first book--to her mother, in which McCracken promises her she'd never appear as a character in her daughter's work), the novel assumes a hybrid quality that could be called autofiction but really is an homage to the art of great storytelling. The meta-dilemma caused by one character's hatred of memoir and books "blaming" parents and another's need to tell a story provides a broad stage upon which McCracken's characters (whoever they may be) can deliver their frustrations, realizations, and appreciations. Though bereaved, McCracken's narrator unfolds her journey through London, and the story of her sometimes-maddening relationship with her parents as they aged, with attention to specific human detail. There is no danger here of any character becoming the disembodied "sentient, anguished helium balloons" McCracken's narrator warns her writing students against creating. Novel? Memoir? Who cares. It's a great story, beautifully told. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
He was enormous; she was tiny. Their filled-to-the-rafters house was a firetrap. He dies first. The unnamed narrator spends as much time with her mother as distance and teaching allow, an unnamed narrator and writer who tells us that she hates unnamed narrators and novels about writers. Always incisive and provocative, McCracken (The Souvenir Museum, 2021) navigates a literary tightrope stretched between fiction and memoir and makes darn sure we know it in a hilarious, bravura, and complexly resonant performance. The narrator takes a solo trip to London, steeped in memories of her mother, who gradually comes into focus as a keenly intelligent woman born with physical limitations who refused to let them hamper her. She enjoyed running a university publications department and was lots of fun, a "great appreciator" who was much appreciated and adored. In each round of remembrance and reflection propelled by her moody and comic London escapades, the narrator shares new realizations about her mother, her hero, and spiky thoughts about writing. In fiction, she tells us, the plot is "the attraction and repulsion between event and emotion," and her "favorite thing about fiction is its ability to anatomize consequence." Transcending categories, McCracken's novel-as-eulogy and meditation on writing and truth is mischievous, funny, canny, and deeply affecting.
Library Journal Review
Traveling from New England to London and walking its winding streets, a writer contemplates the life of her recently deceased mother and their relationship, marveling at her mother's stubborn conquest of her troubles while feeling that her profound need for privacy is being violated by even chronicling these thoughts. From National Book Award finalist McCracken; with a 125,000-copy first printing.