Review by 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.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by 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.)
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Review by 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.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
"Your family is the first novel that you know." Meandering about London in the summer of 2019, 10 months after the death of her mother, McCracken's nameless (maybe!) narrator recounts episodes from her mother's extraordinary life and their quirk-filled family. Like all good stories, it's complicated, and the mother in question was brilliant, stubborn, bad with money, secretive, and oppositional. Yet she was more fun than anyone else her daughter knew. Challenged by daunting physical limitations due to an injury with forceps when she was born, the older woman expended efforts to lead an active and successful life that could be considered heroic. (The achievement of "fun" seems superheroic.) Braided into McCracken's gorgeously spiraling narrative is an expansive meditation on the act of writing and, intriguingly, the art of writing memoir. Beginning with the dedication page (a photograph of an inscription--written in McCracken's first book--to her mother, in which McCracken promises her she'd never appear as a character in her daughter's work), the novel assumes a hybrid quality that could be called autofiction but really is an homage to the art of great storytelling. The meta-dilemma caused by one character's hatred of memoir and books "blaming" parents and another's need to tell a story provides a broad stage upon which McCracken's characters (whoever they may be) can deliver their frustrations, realizations, and appreciations. Though bereaved, McCracken's narrator unfolds her journey through London, and the story of her sometimes-maddening relationship with her parents as they aged, with attention to specific human detail. There is no danger here of any character becoming the disembodied "sentient, anguished helium balloons" McCracken's narrator warns her writing students against creating. Novel? Memoir? Who cares. It's a great story, beautifully told. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
