The Hero of This Book

By Elizabeth McCracken

Ecco 192 pp.

By Joan Silverman

Elizabeth McCracken’s new book is a meditation on grief, a travelogue, and a love letter to her late mother. It’s also the author’s attempt to sort out the issue of privacy, and whether she has the right to chronicle her mother’s life posthumously, without her mother’s consent. The Hero of This Book is designated as a novel, with a wink and a nod toward memoir, as the author unspools her ambivalence in the matter. Think of it as an internal monologue that a devoted daughter is working out on the page. This is McCracken at her finest — incisive, playful, and wise, as she portrays the extraordinary life that her mother led, their relationship, and the loss that has followed.

“I came to understand: Your family is the first novel that you know,” McCracken says. “Before I lived in Iowa (to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop), I might not have been that interested in my mother …. I wrote stories about Des Moines and was occasionally told that my characters weren’t believable, particularly the ones most like my relatives. I never wrote about my mother.”

Indeed, her parents were the very stuff of fiction. Her father, at 6’3”, with a white beard and large belly, was often mistaken for Santa Claus. Her mother, a Jewish girl from Des Moines, was just under five feet, a theater maven with multiple degrees, and a little powerhouse. The two of them were “a sight gag,” McCracken says, and opposites temperamentally, to boot. They both taught at various colleges, and landed at Boston University, where her mother was editor in charge of publications.

That her mother was also disabled was neither a headline nor beside the point; it just paled beside how manifestly able she was — an enthusiast and daredevil; vibrant, accomplished, unstoppable. The author is quick to remind us that The Little Engine That Could was, after all, a woman.

Incredibly, McCracken never knew the name or cause of her mother’s condition until she was 26. She didn’t ask, and the subject never came up. Her mother had cerebral palsy, the result of a forceps injury at birth which, in her mother’s childhood home, was never considered a birth defect.

“Mostly in my childhood we used the phrase, ‘She walks with canes.’ Accurate, particular. That was what my mother liked in language; she was an editor. She disliked the word ‘disabled,’” McCracken says.

Her mother held many opinions, on a range of topics. “She might have laughed more than anyone I know,” the author writes. “She insisted that she invented the mojito — I’m still unclear on her evidence …. and also somehow children’s Tylenol.”

Her mother’s views on privacy were bedrock, which gets to the heart of this book: McCracken’s mother believed that personal privacy was absolute, inviolable. This, in part, because of multiple surgeries she endured as a child, her privacy always in the balance. She denounced memoirs, and especially those that complained about parents. And she believed in the sanctity of an inner life that’s not for public consumption. The author, by contrast, is a cynic who writes mostly fiction, and knows good material when she sees it. But she had long ago made a promise to her mother — namely, that her mother would never appear as a character in one of her books.

Then, this.

The author tells tales out of school, to be sure. Among them, she details her parents’s hoarding, which began innocently enough, until it took on a life of its own. Over time, her parents were relegated to living in the few rooms of their house that weren’t waist-high in stuff. The place was a firetrap and source of endless worry for McCracken. She describes the chaos of her mother’s later years — a botched spinal surgery, nursing home stays, an aneurysm, frequent calls to 911. And yet, McCracken offers these details as ballast for the otherwise high-flying, buoyant life that her mother led.

The book toggles back and forth among Boston, the author’s childhood home, where her parents continued to live; Austin, Texas, where the author has lived and taught for the last decade or so; and London, where McCracken and her then 81-year-old mother travelled together for the last time, in 2016, and which the author revisits, in 2019, the year after her mother’s death.

On that latter trip to London, the newly bereaved author was wistful, imagining her mother’s presence. Among the images McCracken recalls, her mother was always rushing to a museum or theater — in her later years, via scooter. Sometimes her mother would accelerate, the author having to catch up or chance losing her mother in the crowd.

“My mother …. was more fun than anyone I knew. She loved being alive and in the world,” McCracken says. “Being alive and in the world with her was like dancing with someone who really knew how to lead.” And later: “My mother had an excellent brain and a quick tongue and a lovely personality, but the most staggering thing about her was her will. If you have difficulty walking, strangers will tell you constantly that you shouldn’t try.” she says. “Walking is what kept her alive.”

So, how does McCracken resolve the privacy issue that bedevils her throughout the book? And is this, finally, a memoir, a novel, or something else?

McCracken allows that the distinction between novel and memoir may be a ruse, a way to lie, or embroider. (For what it’s worth, much of this book is verifiably true.) She teases about the content of her earlier books, claiming to have dropped secrets about herself, followed by denials. Now she insists that she no longer cares. She decides, in the end, that the dead have no privacy left.

“If you want to write a memoir without writing a memoir, go ahead and call it something else,” she says. “Let other people argue about it. Arguing with yourself or the dead will get you nowhere.”

For those who debate whether the book may be autofiction, McCracken demurs: “I don’t write autofiction. I don’t even know what it is, though it sounds like it might be written by a robot, or a kiosk, or a European.”

Ultimately, the book’s genre is a guessing game, a ploy, of sorts, that raises intriguing moral and philosophical questions. But McCracken has addressed all that for herself, and moved on. In the process, she has given us a terrific story, a tribute to her mother that’s gorgeously written, smart, witty, loving, and tart.

Joan Silverman writes op-eds, essays, and book reviews. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including The Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Tribune, and Dallas Morning News. She is the author of Someday This Will Fit, a collection of linked essays.