The Hero of This Book

By Elizabeth McCracken

Ecco 2022

It may seem odd for a critic to esteem a book while also rejecting it, but it’s not impossible. Critics are universal in their praise of Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and rightly so. But if a doctor offered you a copy of A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek instead of your next chemotherapy treatment, you’d emphatically reject it. And if that doctor told you A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was, in fact, your next chemotherapy treatment, you’d reject both the book and the doctor. Even in the malignantly make-your-own-reality 21st century, the actual meanings of words can matter. 

Readers will esteem the skimpy new book by Elizabeth McCracken, The Hero of This Book. Like everything else this author has written, it’s simply beautifully done, with sharp, arresting language and imagery on every page. It’s the story of McCracken’s mother, realized in a supple combination of obviously treasured family memories and the author’s warm but pitiless reflections on those memories. Those memories make unfailingly good stories, often rendered in discreet nuggets of sentiment and raw self-evaluation:

My mother needed so many shoes because of her mercurial feet. They swelled in humidity. The tendons seized up. In later years her muscles stopped cooperating and it became a struggle to get any shoes onto her feet. Somehow I forgot this until she visited me, or I visited her, and it was my job to shoe my mother. “Time to go!” I’d say, and she’d say cheerily, “OK, I need to get my shoes on.” If all she brought were the cheap Keds lace-ups she favored, this could take half an hour. She owned dozens of pairs of Keds, which she insisted fit her. “Pull on the tongue,” she’d command, as I knelt and toiled. 

“They don’t fit,” I’d say, out of breath.

“Nobody else has this problem,” she claimed. By nobody she mean the various aides who helped her around the house. I later pettily interrogated them. My mother, it pains me to say, it delights me, was lying.

These are touching memories, but the publisher has stamped “A Novel” on  the dust jacket of this book, and McCracken herself periodically steps out of the narrative just long enough to tell her readers that they’re reading a work of fiction, not a memoir. The reason why such bizarre repeated instructions are necessary is simple: The Hero of This Book is a memoir. It’s a short memoir of Elizabeth McCracken’s mother. It is not a novel. 

In her New York Times review of the book, Janice Lee asks “When is a memoir not a memoir?” and then immediately gives the wrong answer: “Maybe when the writer insists that it is not.” Which gets the only possible prompt response: Who cares what the author insists? If Thomas Mann insisted that The Magic Mountain was a cookbook, would it become one? 

McCracken herself certainly does insist. She even taunts, right out of the gate. “Perhaps you fear writing a memoir, reasonably,” she writes. “Invent a single man and call your book a novel. The freedom one fictional man grants you is immeasurable.” This is simply false, and McCracken must know it.  Including one footnote in German wouldn’t make The Hero of This Book a work of 19th century history. Including one line of mind-numbing tedium wouldn’t make The Hero of This Book a work of philosophy. Including one incel dog-whistle wouldn’t make The Hero of This Book a work by Jordan Peterson. 

She of course includes more than one invented man. But she also includes a photo of an inscription she wrote on the flyleaf of one of her earlier books, promising that she would never make her mother the main character in one of her books. It’s not a simulated photo – it’s plucked from McCracken’s scrapbook. It erases any distance between the characters in this “novel” and the characters in real life. It’s there for one reason only: to comment on a memoir. 

McCracken keeps hitting the note nevertheless:

If this were a memoir – it isn’t – the author might talk at length about her own connection to her grandmother on the subject of self-recrimination, how easy it is to blame yourself for the harm that comes to children during pregnancy, and how other people, even well-meaning ones, will blame you, too. It isn’t; she won’t. No book can contain everything.

This would be bad enough in any case (since this is, in fact, a memoir), but it’s made very much worse by the tossed-off lazy cynicism of that last line. What reader can’t feel at least a little nose-wrinkle of insult at “No book can contain everything”? When she mentions her father, she includes the parenthetical: “I miss him. I’m sorry he doesn’t fit in this book. I’m sorry his last year was unhappy.” Characters in a novel “fit” because the author has created them to fit (and it to fit them); people in a memoir sometimes don’t fit, in the way that Eleanor Roosevelt’s teenage equitation teacher might not “fit” into her memoir about the Second World War. The Hero of This Book is 170 pages soaking wet with rocks in its pockets; McCracken’s father didn’t “fit” because this is a memoir about her mother.

It’s easy to know why mainstream publishers have fallen into the near-universal practice of this lie of labeling: fiction reliably outsells nonfiction. It’s much more difficult to know why the authors agree to it, particularly since it’s depressing to think the reason is the same. In any case, this lie creates a cognitive tension that dogs the pages like a rheumatism; you’re trying to enjoy the sad, loving, knowing prose, and the whole time someone is persistently whispering in your ear, “This is a field guide to North American trees. Remember, this is a field guide to North American trees.” 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor.