MEMOIR: An Exact Replica of a Figment of my Imagination: A MemoirBy Elizabeth McCracken Jonathan Cape
A first child is stillborn. In the opening pages of her memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, the American novelist Elizabeth McCracken writes, "You don't have to tell me how sad that is; it happened to me and my husband, our baby, a son". A little over a year later, a healthy baby boy is born, "a beautiful, funny-looking, monkeyish, longed-for baby, exactly who we wanted to meet".
This is a book in which Elizabeth McCracken charts what happens in between these two extreme events. She does so with intelligence, an impressive calmness and is unflinching in her description of “the happiest story in the world with an unbearable ending”.
From the very beginning, the writing is brutally truthful. “A child dies in this book; a baby.” Whereas lesser writers might succumb to sentimentality, McCracken’s triumph as a storyteller lies in her wise arrangement of memory. The narrative is split into short sections which makes the rawness of the memoir bearable. But these sections do not just focus on loss, they also meander through McCracken’s life, from the time prior to meeting her husband, through to their travels, their settling in France during her first pregnancy – a “sure thing” she thought – and their eventual returning to America where the second child is born.
Throughout, the author's black humour is prevalent. After the stillbirth, the midwife asked Voulez-vous parler à une nonne? But McCracken's husband hears it as Voulez-vous parler à un nain? Or, "Would you like to speak to a dwarf?" After that, they both darkly theorised that perhaps it was a Bordelaise tradition; the dwarves of grief, kept in the basement of hospitals for worst-off patients.
Of her husband, she jokes that she “ordered him from Barnes and Noble”, having met him at a party thrown by the bookstore in New York. We are quickly given glimpses of their nomadic, writerly existence. They divide their time between teaching in Iowa and making money, to travelling to Europe and spending it all in Denmark, Ireland, Berlin.
When she is two months pregnant, they move to remote Savary, an hour east of Bordeaux, and it is just “one more adventure”. The house has “eight bathrooms, two kitchens and a single possible pine-marten”. It is surrounded by farmland and vineyards. There is also a view from the kitchen of the village of Duras, from which Marguerite Duras – a writer whose own first child, a son, was stillborn in 1942 – took her name.
At times I found McCracken’s descriptions of her time in France patronising. The house is “agreeably hilarious” and “the language barrier alienating”. Perhaps she might have had a more enriching experience had she learnt the language. One of the doctors she attends is irritatingly described – as though he has just walked off the set of a Monty Python film. He is a “short, comical Frenchman, who spoke idiosyncratic English” and talks of giving her a prenatal “hex-ray”. She declines and never returns to him again.
Not speaking much French, the couple’s experience of France is necessarily limited. Their Anglophone neighbours – McCracken is unrepentant as she pokes fun at them, calling them “the Sots” – are always “depressingly drunk and broke”.
It is a cruelty also apparent later on in the book, when, angered by a particular friend who failed to immediately contact her after the stillbirth, McCracken is scathing about her “attempt to turn her silence into something noble” and never communicates with her again. Equally, I felt the self-indulgent roll call of friends – one, we are told, a “famous writer” – who caringly responded to McCracken’s loss and “moved” her, could have been omitted from the book.
A testament to grief, this story certainly is. But having finished it, I couldn’t help wondering who would want to read a book like this – a story, by McCracken’s own admission, “so grim and lesson-less it’s better not to think about it at all”. The author herself, though, seems to find a type of personal resolution through the hopeful way she ends the book. A “gorgeous, inscrutable” new baby is born. And in the last lines, Elizabeth McCracken corrects herself. “It’s a happy life, but someone is missing” becomes “It’s a happy life, and someone is missing”. But the writer’s acknowledgement that it is possible to have a happy life, though a child is “missing” forever, seems to me too neat, too banal a conclusion to the devastating experience of a stillbirth, otherwise so heartbreakingly described in the rest of the book.
- An Exact Replica of a Figment of my Imagination: A MemoirBy Elizabeth McCracken Jonathan Cape, 184pp. £14.99
Enda Wyley is a poet. Her fourth collection,
To Wake to This
, is published this month by Dedalus Press