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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 (3)
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.)
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.