An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: a Memoir
Elizabeth McCracken (Little Brown, 2008)
I’m a long-time fan of Elizabeth McCracken’s writing, and I’ve had this on the to-read shelf for a while; now I see what may have held me back. The subject is perhaps the saddest subject possible, a pregnancy that goes to full term and ends without a live baby; on that ground alone, I can’t universally recommend it. On the other hand, perhaps there are people who should be required to read it, including anyone who wants to treat pregnant people, or make laws about them.
You can tell early on, however, that McCracken is going to present to us all kinds of emotions. “As for me, I believe that if there’s a God–and I am as neutral on the subject as is possible–then the most basic proof of His existence is black humor. What else explains it, that odd, reliable comfort that billows up at the worst moments, like a beautiful sunset woven out of the smoke over a bombed city.”
McCracken and her husband, Edward, are both writers. In their early marriage, which is to say, their mid-thirties, they lived between Europe and the US, as teaching jobs or whim might dictate. For economy’s sake, during her pregnancy, they moved to the countryside in Bordeaux. It was a preposterous house, enormous and cold, which had once housed unwed mothers and their offspring. “The house was surrounded by farmland and vineyards, cows out some windows and horses out others, and a vast patio off the summer kitchen…” But all that is lost now, put away with the grief. It’s as if, she says, time forked as in science fiction; on one track, she and Edward can remember this as a happy time, and share its memories with their little boy; “on the other track, the one I accidentally took, he died, and we left France.”
Edward and Elizabeth moved to England for the summer of 2006, then back to the US, and had a second child just fifty-three weeks after the first, complicating the bifurcated track all over again. He’s an eldest child, who had an elder brother once. She wrote this book while he was still a baby, while her memory was fresh, but after it had begun to gel into a comprehensible shape. It’s a writerly response to the nine months that are now missing from her life, because they were so happy when they happened, and then their meaning flipped. McCracken doesn’t want to turn the first child into an angel, nor to erase him completely, so we have this book.
“Perhaps it goes without saying that I believe in the geographic cure. Of course you can’t out-travel sadness. You will find it has smuggled itself along in your suitcase. It coats the camera lens, it flavors the local cuisine….I travel not to get away from my troubles but to see how they look in front of famous buildings or on deserted beaches. I take them for walks. Sometimes I get them drunk. Back at home we generally understand each other better.” That makes sense to me, though I tend to do my traveling in books.
She went to New Orleans eighteen months after Hurricane Katrina, when she was seven months into the new pregnancy, where her sorrow had a sort of family reunion. Not just the orange tattoos on the buildings, but a woman who says to her, “My first child was stillborn, too.” There’s a sort of kinship, mostly invisible, like a very large club you never asked to join.
Obviously, I’m sorry about the death of little Pudding, who acquired this rather Dickensian moniker in his first days as an embryo. I’m happy for the birth of his brother, who must be about to graduate from high school. I’m happy that all that is so far in the past, though, of course, we’ve all had new sorrows to be going on with, and new joys.
Jan 1 2024
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