November 12, 2022
The Hero of This Book, by Elizabeth McCracken
Elizabeth McCracken is one of my favourite authors, one of those whose new releases are always a must-purchase. Ever since Thunderstruck and Other Stories, which I read in 2014, I’ve been dazzled by the wonderful strangeness of McCracken’s perspective; in The Hero of This Book, her narrator writes, “I have no interest in ordinary people, having met so few of them in my life.”
The narrator of The Hero of the This Book is not McCracken herself, for this book is not a memoir—and its narrator is just as sure that she is no memoirist (whereas McCracken herself has published a memoir before). The book cannot be a memoir because McCracken had always promised her mother that she’d never appear as a character in her work, never mind that McCracken’s mother would make a remarkable character if she did, and that the eponymous hero of McCracken’s novel (a slim book made up of reflections and memories, ideas about writing and storytelling, and episodes from a trip the narrator takes to London in 2019 in the wake of her mother’s death) bears a resemblance to such a character. “Everything makes more sense if you know what my parents looked like,” a section of this book begins, the narrator’s enormous father countered by his wife who was less than five feet tall, was disabled and walked with canes. “She was a Jewish girl of Eastern European descent, born in a small town near Des Moines, Iowa, the older of twin girls. She always loved what made her statistically unusual.”
It’s the most peculiar, extraordinary love story, an ode to a mother who never said “I love you,” because she didn’t have to. A woman fiercely protective of her own self, her own story, and who would—her daughter is sure—be affronted by being put in a book. But here she is, but it’s fiction, or is it, but it doesn’t matter. Like everything McCracken writes, it’s weird, rich and wonderful.
