An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

"An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination"

by Elizabeth McCracken

Publisher: Little, Brown & Company

Pub. Date: September 2008

184 pages

Reviewed by Cricket Hater

A memoir is personal. A personal recollection of an event or occasion, written down for all the world to see. Like opening up your journal pages to let everyone read your mind. Elizabeth McCracken chooses to write this memoir about a painful, personal loss and shares it with the world in this touching book.

From the opening sentence you immediately like McCracken's wit as a writer and then embrace her sorrow as she shares the painful experience of losing her first born child whom she had to deliver still born in the ninth month of pregnancy.

From Amazon:

"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."

From Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon ) "In AN EXACT REPLICA OF A FIGMENT OF MY IMAGINATION, 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."

In writing this review a comment I found from Mark Doty, author of Dog Years, sums up the feelings of this book so well..."A child dies in this book: a baby,'" Elizabeth McCracken tell us early on, so that we we might not hope too much, as she has, for the beautiful child who would grace her life. Alert to every nuance of feeling, McCracken writes with such clarity and immediacy that we hope anyway. 'It's a happy life,' she says, 'and someone is missing.' That these statements can both be true is the mark of great emotional maturity, and of a writer who rises to the human complexity of grief with all her powers, and all her heart."

Somehow she makes it o.k. to move onto happiness and hold onto sadness, just in the distances of our minds. It's o.k. to be happy and still have that dull ache of loss from time to time.

I love what she says when talking about caring for her son Gus, "Every piece of hope was tinged with sadness; every moment of relief was lit on the edges with worry." I can feel what she is saying because for different reasons than hers, I feel it too. This is a profound little piece of a personal pain that in it's own unique way left me feeling hope.

Bravo!