Readings: Elizabeth McCracken's THE HERO OF THIS BOOK
A book about a mother who has died. Or, rather ... a book about a child after a mother has died. Or, rather ...
FullDisclosure: If you are new to my substack, and you’re expecting a precis of the book, know this, I am terrible at synopses, besides which there are endless of them about every book all over the internet, many of which are written by people who encapsulate and market books for a living. Trust them. When I’m moved to write about a book, it is because it reflects part of me, prompts memories and roils feelings, I identify with the story, the author (as I imagine them to be), and so it is with THE HERO OF THIS BOOK.
THE HERO OF THIS BOOK, by Elizabeth McCracken, Ecco, An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, October 2022
I have read Elizabeth McCracken’s books with a pack of Post-It sticky arrows and a dangerously sharpened Blackwing 602 pencil at hand since before I knew her.
I cannot tell you how many times I re-wrote the preceding sentence in the fear that Elizabeth McCracken would be forced to read it and find it wanting. And while it may achieve its intended result, to help you, dear reader, to envisage my admiration for Elizabeth McCracken’s writing, it is not — strictly — factual. It does, however, tell you a truth about me.
But the facts, just the facts, ma’am, are as follows. I read Elizabeth McCracken’s first novel, THE GIANT’S HOUSE, the year it came out, 1996, and immediately she became one of those authors whose books I waited for like a child waits for Christmas morning or the last day of school, or like a gayman waits for the next Patti LuPone musical or the Grindr message-alert from his phone. I wish I could tell you why I picked it up, but I don’t remember if it was a book review section (They still existed then, and I subscribed to the Sunday editions of both the Washington Post and the New York Times, which were — in that pre personal-electronic-tablet-smartphone-laptop-earbuds era from hell — actual physical hunks of deliciously touchable, weighty, finger smudging newsprint thrown at your front door, or more often, if available, into a puddle or thorny bush.), or if it was the cover that intrigued me, or a suggestion from the bookstore owner I then adored and with whom I spent many an afternoon, having tea in her little patronized — and soon to surrender to Borders which then surrendered to Amazon — shop, or it was brought to my attention by a friend — although at that time in my life I had very few friends and none of them shared my reading obsession; but whatever the reason I read it, I didn’t read it with Post-It arrows — which I don’t think were marketed until the 2000s — by my side, nor did I yet own or even know of Blackwing 602 pencils, which were brought into my consciousness by an article about Stephen Sondheim, he wrote with them, as had Truman Capote, and so I had long wanted to do so myself but did not until the Covid lockdown, during which time I had one of my periodic “I’m going to really write another novel and get myself an agent and be published” manic phases and purchased yet another talismanic collection of pencils and notebooks I imagined would propel me into the pantheon of Twitter authors and literary folk I had come to follow and know and love, mostly because of Elizabeth McCracken, who was the first author I followed when I was forced by an employer to start a Twitter account to hawk my weekly theatre reviews and commentary column called RANTS AND RAVES.
So, okay, I didn’t always read Elizabeth McCracken’s books using Post-It arrows and Blackwing pencils. Especially before I knew her.
Knew her. I don’t want to mislead here: while I have met Elizabeth McCracken in person and interacted with her on Twitter, and she once sent me a ham, and, too, has sent me a copy of this book, and I do in a Dollar Store/off-brand Randy Rainbow song-parody way write her a birthday ditty every year which I Twitter-send, I can’t really — wouldn’t presume to — say I know her. Although, I know her. You can know a person’s heart without exchanging holiday cards. We have a connection, mothers and duchesses and a mild-to-serious misanthropy. She has met one of my dearest friends, Andrea, who actually facilitated our in-person introduction when I said I wasn’t going to the book festival where Elizabeth was speaking because it was inevitable I would be disappointing in person — I’m much better at a Twitter-distance than I am in the flesh — and Andrea said, “Of course you’re going, I’m taking you.” And she did. And, too, I have met one of Elizabeth’s good friends, Ann Patchett, when she came to my hometown as part of a writer-speaker series and did a signing where another of my dearest friends, Sue, forced me to stand in line and get my book signed. I gushed at Ann Patchett about “knowing” Elizabeth and she kindly listened and allowed her picture to be taken with me. Which Elizabeth had also allowed.
Too, we share a devotion to Her Grace, Duchess Goldblatt.
And, my mother died almost exactly six months after Elizabeth’s mother died.
But, the gist is, while my first sentence tells a truth about my life, it is fiction. And, in a story told in THE HERO OF THIS BOOK, the author had a deadline for a workshop and …
…so I wrote about a time with my grandmother and aunt and called it ‘a nonfiction short story.’ The reception, as I recall, was particularly terrible. ‘What does this even mean?’ one of my classmates asked. ‘A nonfiction short story. Which is it, fiction or nonfiction? It matters.’
And so, however THE HERO OF THIS BOOK is labeled — nonfiction novel, fabulist memoir — it is a carving in literary marble of a woman who belongs in the Mother Hall of Fame, bestowing on her spirit and life-force a deserved permanence — as permanent as writing can be, which, in some instances — and I suspect it will be the case with Elizabeth McCracken’s work — is a very long time. And so whether the connection Elizabeth and I have qualifies as knowing one another, friends, acquaintances, stalkerism (me), it has made my life better, and it seems right to share that before I talk about how much I loved THE HERO OF THIS BOOK.
As is always the case with Elizabeth’s writing, the sentences are musically wrought without being show-off-y, and the take on reality, the rendering of the world in which we live is unique, singular, and perceptive. In the narrative, the author travels to London, alone, after her mother’s death, revisiting and remembering places they had been to and seen together, one of which is the Tate Modern where there is a Nan Goldin exhibit, into which darkened room where a slideshow is being presented the author walks and wonders how many of the people in the artworks projected onto the museum wall are still alive:
“…Here they were. Inside a museum.
“Here I was, too. Here I am. Passing for ordinary, but I am not ordinary. I am not normal. The opposite of ordinary is not extraordinary; the opposite of ordinary is dozens of words that have nothing in common with one another.”
I read a passage like that and I think — or, I feel — or, I am STRUCK by the feeling that prompts the thought, the recognition of, “AHA! YES! EXACTLY THAT! THAT IS WHAT IT IS, WHAT I MEAN!” Which is why I love Elizabeth’s writing; Elizabeth manages to capture and shape into sentences those ethereal, impalpable moments of life, and in doing so solves mysteries of emotion and her writing resonates at the level of universal human experience, so that reading her work is not only a delight for those who love words and great writing, but as it is with those writers who become part of the canon, it often opens the door to catharsis and clarity concerning one’s own personal history.
At one point she writes: “The fictional me is unmarried, an only child, childless. The actual me is not.” Followed not long after by answering when told she should write about her parents:
“Not when they’re alive,” not because they were awful — they were wonderful — but because they were odd and extraordinarily private and I didn’t feel I could write about them with any kind of honesty — a necessity, even in, especially in, fiction — if I knew they were going to read it.
Putting aside her masterful syntax and punctuation — never in her writing do you ever read a sentence and think, “Wait a minute, what?” and need to re-read it to figure out what that particular combination of words in that specific order are meant to mean; with Elizabeth it is always clear — there is in that sentence the key, I think, to why it is meaningless if THE HERO OF THIS BOOK is a memoir or novel. She says it is not a memoir, it is fiction, which means that is especially honest — whether or not the details are exact matches for those lived by the characters in real life, the emotional heft is genuine and openhearted, written by the most reliable of narrators.
The fictional ME, or, rather, this writing me, might as well also be an only child. Though my mother had six children who lived and three (or four, it’s in dispute) miscarriages, and though those who were still alive were unstintingly there while she was dying, when it came to her last few months, and especially her last few days and hours, what I remember most are the moments between the two of us.
The last call I got from the residential care facility where she lived, Record Street Home, came on Mother’s Day night, because after having decided she did not want to go back to the hospital no matter what, her pain was such that she changed her mind and asked the nurse on duty to call me so she could ask me what to do. She wanted my permission to go to the hospital since she’d told me I was not to let her go back and I was her designated medical power of attorney. I was ten minutes away and said I would come right in to ride with her in the ambulance.
At the hospital, when we arrived and were being first seen, I had — again — to face the distrust and unspoken reproach of the staff when explaining that Mommy only wanted palliative care, for the pain to stop. Once having cleared that hurdle, I then had to answer when they asked me why, if that was the case, the staff at Record Street hadn’t just increased her morphine dose? It was a fight I had and would have again with the nurses at Record Street the last 48 hours of her life, but at that point, in the hospital, they gave Mommy a drug which — I discovered after researching it myself — was contraindicated in geriatric patients and resulted in her hallucinating.
By this time, all five of Mommy’s still living children, and honorary daughter(in-law), were in the curtained emergency room cubicle with her and I was periodically having to stop doctors and nurses and interns from doing other than palliative care, and my sisters were scolding me, telling me the doctors knew what they were doing, at which point I’d wave my phone in their faces, usually crying, barking “NO THEY DAMN WELL DON’T!” as I did so, showing them the information about the contraindicated drug, at which point my mother in what I am sure was an effort to shut me up, began to imagine herself at one of our many family dinners over the decades, and was in a panic that the ham she was carving was not big enough to feed everyone. I am not ashamed to say that after the initial shock of seeing her and speaking to her while she was clearly on another plane of existence, we all started laughing, taking turns being out of control, breathless with hysteria, which, once it starts in my family, is viral and very, very difficult to bring to a full stop; one of us manages to calm down, another one goes, and on and on in a sympathetic circle of spasmodic chortle and guffaw. This was exacerbated when, at one point, Mommy turned to me and said in disapproving tone, “JoAnne (that’s my older sister), where is Charlie, and what in the world did you do to your hair? It looks horrible. Someone, get more ham. And where is Charlie?”
I like to think, now, that some part of Mommy in some far away level of being, knew we all needed to laugh so we would not dissolve into unspeakable levels of keening lamentation.
The return trip to Record Street from the emergency room was also a laugh riot. Mommy was alert and conversational. And incredibly high. We were transported by the same two attendants who’d brought us to the hospital a few hours earlier. Mommy remembered them and went into a long paean to do with them being her very favorite ambulance attendants ever, and she was so glad it was them taking her on this, her very last ambulance ride on earth.
It was a few days later, after that return, when she lost consciousness permanently, and then it was another day (I think, it may have been more, it’s no longer clear) before she died. She’d made me promise I would not let the others see her die, she didn’t want them to remember their last moments with her like that, and so when she did breathe her last, I was an only child.
The Record Street nurses told me, once she’d died and I just kept standing there, holding her hand, saying, “It’s fine. It’s fine. I love you.” that I should leave while they got her ready for the funeral home staff, and so I went and sat on the stairs, in the hallway, across from her room. Another of the ladies who lived there, Dorothy, came by, with her walker, and said, “Please tell your mother I’m thinking of her.” I didn’t hesitate even a moment before saying, “I can’t. She just died.” Dorothy, shocked at my blank-faced declaration, said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”
I hate that phrase. Along with saying “passed” or “passed away” instead of died. I didn’t misplace her. She didn’t take a stroll. She died. For fuck’s sake. DIED.
After the nurses had cleaned her up, I sat in her room, with a body which clearly had nothing to do with my mother, she was gone from her face, I could not feel her in the room, but there I sat unwilling or unable to leave the body for over an hour until the undertakers arrived and rolled it away on a gurney, in a purple body bag. I wish it had been pink. Her favorite color. I gathered her purse, and her glasses, and her favorite scarf — which I had convinced her to buy, an extremely pricey, pink paisley pashmina — and I left.
And why, in what is meant to be a piece appreciating and encouraging you to buy Elizabeth’s THE HERO OF THIS BOOK, am I writing about me and my mother? As Elizabeth writes in response to the spirit of her mother asking why she, Elizabeth, is writing about her:
Because otherwise you’d evanesce, and that I cannot bear.
And that sentence is the truest of all truths, and the hardest part of someone you love dying, when they start to fade. But, also true, it has been my experience that even as the initial pain recedes, it can (and does) come back at any time, triggered by a perfume, a trip to the grocery store (my mom wanted to go at least twice a week), a song, or the desire to tell her something — which is the cruelest of all, that, “Oh, I can’t wait to tell Mommy this!” followed by the remembering that she is dead and can’t be told. After a while, mostly, the memories are welcome, are comforting. Yet, truest of all, no matter how long it’s been since they died, it feels like it just happened.
It is that urgency of emotion, the rushing other-ness you feel, the loss of something foundational in your life, someone whose presence in your life and whose reflection and perception of you defined for you who you were, all of that, and, as a bonus, valuable insight into what it means to be and how to be a writer that makes THE HERO OF THIS BOOK such a necessary, shrewdly funny, disarmingly real and true read. I give it ten out of five stars, because it is a solar system unto itself.
Loved this review/essay, Charlie! And likewise love you, Elizabeth, Ann... My own mother was a "major" character (three sport champion, horrible cook, carried a Colt 45 to shoot at poachers on her land) and the richness and tragedy of that uneasy relationship lingers still, long after her passing. And may I add, what a great picture of you and Elizabeth!
I love this, Charlie, in all ways. I love the book review and am going to get it from a book store very much like your friends, before the Amazon’s take it away. I lost my Mother working the last year or so, and your time with your Mother during her leaving this world resonated with me. Like you, I’m the one in my family to “handle shit.” I would have liked to have know your Mother, I know you were special to each other. Thanks for sharing with us. You’re a treasure, man.