Review by New York Times Review
Elizabeth McCracken's memoir of a pregnancy gone wrong. IF a book's merit were measured in subway stops accidentally bypassed while being read, the novelist Elizabeth McCracken's affecting memoir about having a stillborn baby would rank high: I found myself three stations past my destination before I realized I'd missed it. No doubt my forgetfulness had something to do with bringing my own maternal history to bear on McCracken's - my first child, too, stopped kicking on her due date - but the author also applies honesty, wisdom and even wit to a painful event. A self-described travel nut, McCracken spent her doomed first pregnancy in a rundown but picturesque former home for single mothers in Bordeaux. The period, she says, ranked among the happiest in her life, with this onetime "spinster" (as she calls herself) basking in wedded bliss with her British husband and their shared expectation of further joy to come. Jokes about the French should be tired by now. Yet McCracken finds fresh material in places like the municipal pool of Bergerac, where she's incredulous at how "the French could gossip while doing the backstroke," and the local gym, where, to her amazement, people "tucked their shirts into their exercise pants." There is also a deliciously rendered passage in which a French obgyn, chatting with a co-worker while giving McCracken a sonogram, explains that "we were writers from England, voilà, the placenta, a lot of English people liked to come to this area of France, the Dordogne, there's the baby's head, the English found it inspiring, look, the bladder." Even after McCracken returns to America, her heart broken by her loss despite a new pregnancy, the sharp observations keep coming. There is the Lamaze class where couples "sit on the floor in the bobsled position," and the infant CPR class in which "the rescue mannequins were the usual beige objects that looked as though they'd died of heroin overdoses." McCracken even gives Dorothy Parker a run for quotable drollness with lines like "I've never gotten over my discomfort at other people's discomfort." Yet, ultimately, "An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination" is sad, at times even tear-inducing, since McCracken offers an unstinting account of her grief and the outlying emotions it engenders, from embarrassment to feelings of failure to misdirected anger - at a moving-man, for one. Her limpid vision extends to the realization that the agony of a stillbirth has as much to do with the parents' projections as anything else: "And so in my grief I understand that mourning is a kind of ventriloquism; we put words into the mouths of our bereavers, but of course it's all entirely about us, our wants, our needs, the dead are satisfied, we are greedy, greedy, greedy, unseemly, self-obsessed." In the book's most moving passage, McCracken imagines her tragedy as a comic book in which her baby is fine in one panel, and then: "In the next panel, seconds later, something is supposed to intervene. ... But Superman never shows. I can see it so clearly. In one panel we are safe and stupid. In the next we're only stupid." The only time McCracken seems blinded by her grief is when, toward the end of this slim volume, she deals with the question of blame. In her seventh month, McCracken decided to deliver the baby, whom she and her husband have nicknamed "Pudding," with the help of a midwife, instead of an obstetrician. The decision proved fateful. When McCracken was unable to feel Pudding moving inside her womb, she booked an emergency appointment with the midwife. The midwife, Claudelle, was able to detect a heartbeat, but a nonstress test performed on the baby suggested trouble. Lacking sonogram equipment and the other tools of high-tech medicine, Claudelle might have sent McCracken straight to the hospital; instead, she sent her home. By 5 o'clock, it was too late. Reflecting on the events that led to Pudding's death, McCracken bends over backward trying not to accuse Claudelle and her colleague Sylvie of negligence. But the reader can't help feeling that McCracken is being too polite. Or is it self-protective? (Giving birth to a stillborn child is perhaps agonizing enough without having to imagine that another human being is responsible.) The only unsympathetic moment in this deeply sympathetic book takes place in the opening chapter. Years earlier, McCracken gives a reading at which a woman in the audience suggests that she "write a book about the lighter side of losing a child." Though it soon emerges that the woman has lost a teenage son, McCracken describes her as a "childish, unnerving person" who'd clearly been "trying people's patience for some time," and whose husband sported "appalling choppers." The description seems inexplicably harsh and even snobbish, especially in light of what McCracken later suffers. However, McCracken revisits the woman's request at the end of the book. Now the mother of a healthy baby boy, born almost exactly a year after Pudding died, McCracken realizes that the woman in the audience was looking for a way to celebrate her son's life rather than simply to mourn his passing. If that was the goal of "An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination" McCracken has more than succeeded. Lucinda Rosenfeld's third novel, "I'm So Happy for You," will be published next summer.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
McCracken, author of The Giant's House (1997), a National Book Award finalist, calls her astonishingly candid memoir the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending. When she and her husband Edward were nearing the end of a 2006 writing sojourn in southern France, and she was in the ninth month of her pregnancy, her unborn baby boy died. Now teaching in upstate New York, and raising her second child, McCracken says she wasn't ready for her first to fade into history hence, this therapeutic memoir. In amazingly insightful chapters, she shares her acutely sensitive thoughts about how she and Edward dealt with their initial grief, how friends and family coped, where the couple placed their futile blame, if any, and the emotional strings attached to their decision to attempt a pregnancy so soon after this tragedy. McCracken manages to limn her poignant story with touches of humor, empathy toward those who struggled to express their awkward sympathy, and, ultimately, hope, in the form of the baby asleep in her lap as she types, one-handed.--Donovan, Deborah Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this stunning memoir of the death in utero of her first child only days before his birth, McCracken has succeeded in writing a beautiful, precise and heartbreaking account without sentimentality or pity. McCracken, whose first novel, The Giant's House, was a National Book Award finalist, writes that at 35 she was prepared to stay a spinster, "the weird aunt, the oddball friend," until she met and married Edward. She became pregnant, and while they were living in an old farmhouse in France they passed over two doctors to select a midwife to deliver "Pudding" in the hospital in Bordeaux. Woven in with the story is the aftermath of his death, the reality of telling the people close to her what happened, and how she and Edward were able to go on. "I felt so ruined by life that I couldn't imagine it ever getting worse," she writes, deciding that if there is a God, "the proof of His existence is black humor," which she uses memorably to tell her story. She later writes of the emotions surrounding her second pregnancy and birth, this time in upstate New York. (That she gives birth to a second child, also a boy, makes it possible for readers to absorb the sadness of her loss.) She lends her narrative a spontaneous feel, as if she's telling as she remembers, making her account all the more personal. In the end, it is a triumph of her will and her writing that she has turned her tragedy into a literary gift. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Novelist McCracken (Niagara Falls All Over Again, 2001, etc.) relates her struggle to deal with the tragedy of a stillborn son. She begins with a bizarre comment from a fan who suggested, years before the author miscarried, that she ought to write a book "about the lighter side of losing a child." McCracken continually revisits this comment in a memoir as slim and piercing as a stiletto. She gradually reveals the horrors of her experience, peeling back layers of memories to reach the most haunting one: delivering her son two days after she learned that he was dead. In a series of artful vignettes, the author staggers rather than glides through her story. Quick, sometimes painful glimpses delineate her adored husband, her writing career, friends who did the right thing and friends who didn't. McCracken and her English spouse were living in rural France during her first pregnancy. They playfully called the fetus Pudding, "for some complicated, funny-only-to-the-progenitors reason." They visited several doctors, none terribly satisfactory, and so decided to have a midwife deliver. Immediately following the baby's death on April 27, 2006, they burned much of what they'd bought for their son and fled to England, then to America, where she had a teaching position waiting. Just a few months later they learned she was pregnant again, and the couple again bounced from one doctor to another until they found a woman they loved. Their son Gus was born one year and five days after they lost Pudding. Through it all, McCracken struggled to write and to forgive herself. "Closure is bullshit," she declares, but her memoir shows her achieving a sort of peace, though never a mindless tranquility. Notable for its spare, intense prose and the author's self-deprecating frankness about her failures as well as those of her loved ones. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
