I just recently finished An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, a memoir by Elizabeth McCracken. The book is part tragedy, part travelogue, part love story. The tragedy is present front and center throughout the book and is the death of Ms. McCracken’s first child (nicknamed Pudding) late in her pregnancy. The story is not linear. You start the book knowing what happened. Because of this, the story is not overly dramatic or somber. It is sad but not maudlin.

When reflecting on a dinner party she attended after losing Pudding, Ms. McCracken shares how difficult it is to be present to grief and how she has failed others who have grieved, “I’ve done it myself, when meeting the grief-struck. It’s as though the sad news Rumpelstiltskin in reverse. To mention it by name is to conjure it up, not the grief but the experience itself; the mother’s suicide, the brother’s overdose, the multiple miscarriages. The sadder the news, the less likely people are to mention it. The moment I lost my innocence about such things, I saw how careless I’d been myself.”

Ms. McCracken is brutally honest, funny and self-deprecating. When, during her second pregnancy, Ms. McCracken is in the doctor’s waiting room, she reflects, “I wanted a separate waiting room for people like me, with different magazines. No Parenting, or Wondertime or Pregnancy, no ads with pink or tawny or pearly smiling infants. I wanted Hold Your Horses Magazine, Don’t Count Your Chickens For Women. Pregnant for the Time Being Monthly.”

The memoir is the appropriate length. Ms. McCraken is an accomplished novelist and at this point an accomplished traveler. Her story could have been longer and full of self importance, but it is isn’t. At 184 pages, it is tight and focused. My congratulations to Elizabeth McCracken on the extraordinary accomplishment of writing such an honest and loving memoir.  More importantly, my congratulations to her for getting to the other side of a tragedy without bitterness or hatred. You can read more about Ms. McCracken here.