The Hero of This Book: A Novel

By Elizabeth McCracken

Named a Top Ten Best Book of the Year by Time and People

Named a Best Book of the Year by: Washington Post * Kirkus Reviews * New Yorker * Chicago Public Library * NPR * Oprah Daily * Philadelphia Enquirer

A taut, groundbreaking, and highly acclaimed novel from bestselling and award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken, about a writer’s relationship with her larger-than-life mother—and about the very nature of writing, memory, and art

Ten months after her mother’s death, the narrator of The Hero of This Book takes a trip to London. The city was a favorite of her mother’s, and as the narrator wanders the streets, she finds herself reflecting on her mother’s life and their relationship. Thoughts of the past meld with questions of the future: Back in New England, the family home is now up for sale, its considerable contents already winnowed.

The narrator, a writer, recalls all that made her complicated mother extraordinary—her brilliant wit, her generosity, her unbelievable obstinacy, her sheer will in seizing life despite physical difficulties—and finds herself wondering how her mother had endured. Even though she wants to respect her mother’s nearly pathological sense of privacy, the woman must come to terms with whether making a chronicle of this remarkable life constitutes an act of love or betrayal.

The Hero of This Book  is a searing examination of grief and renewal, and of a deeply felt relationship between a child and her parents. What begins as a question of filial devotion ultimately becomes a lesson in what it means to write. At once comic and heartbreaking, with prose that delights at every turn, this is a novel of such piercing love and tenderness that we are reminded that art is what remains when all else falls away.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Oct 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9780062971302

Elizabeth McCracken

Elizabeth McCracken is the author of seven books, including The Souvenir Museum (long-listed for the National Book Award), Bowlaway, Thunderstruck & Other Stories (winner of the 2014 Story Prize and long-listed for the National Book Award), and The Giant’s House (a National Book Award finalist). Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, won three Pushcart Prizes, a National Magazine Award, and an O. Henry Prize. She has served on the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently holds the James Michener Chair for Fiction at the University of Texas at Austin.

Book preview

This was the summer before the world stopped. We thought it was pretty bad, though in retrospect there was joy to be found. Aboveground monsters were everywhere, with terrible hair and red neckties. The monsters weren’t in control of their powers—the hate crimes, mass shootings, heat waves, stupidity, certainty, flash floods, wildfires—but they had reach. Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Turns out we were supposed to.

August 2019: I shouldn’t be vague, though that’s my nature. Things felt dire, which now seems laughable. You could still unthinkingly go places. Myself, I’d gone to London, where a heat wave had bent train rails and shut down art exhibitions and turned the English into pink, panting mammals. I, pink, mammalian, panted alongside them. I was trying to decide what I thought about my life.

On the internet I’d found a small hotel in Clerkenwell, a neighborhood I hadn’t heard of. "Clarkenwell," the owner of the hotel clarified when I arrived, but I couldn’t get the hang of deforming only the one e and kept calling it Clarkenwall. He was a gentle, blinky Englishman named Trevor, who might have been thirty and might have been fifty. He had a shaved head, hoops in both ears; he wore espadrilles, long loose shorts, and a brown linen vest, which he surely called a waistcoat and surely pronounced weskit. Altogether he looked like someone who was either a vegan or knew how to mindfully butcher a pig and use up every bit, snout and kidneys, trotters and tail.

Perhaps you fear writing a memoir, reasonably. Invent a single man and call your book a novel. The freedom one fictional man grants you is immeasurable.

Here for pleasure? Trevor asked. Or is it work?

Bit of both, I said finally, with an accidental English accent.

Trevor smiled. His canines were obelisks. Come this way. You’ll like it here. Full of history. They used to hang people on the green.

Wonderful, I answered.

The usual feeling of having my fortune told came over me, as it did whenever I approached accommodation for the first time. Good, I was blessed; bad, cursed. A short list of my minor obsessions: hotel rooms, fortune-tellers, coin-op machines. Embarrassing, how much I refer to fortune-telling in my life—by life, I mean writing. Not memoir: I am not a memoirist. The room at Trevor’s was on the ground floor—a curse—but the photos on the website hadn’t done justice to the green leather armchair or shown at all the little desk in the bay window, the old cast-iron stove set into the fireplace.

Trevor’s hand, as he gestured, was knuckly and atremble. Cooker’s original to the house, he said. Georgian. There would have been a whole family in this one room. Just the two nights?

Yes, I said, alas. Alas was one of those things I said too often, a way to say no while presenting myself as helpless.

He nodded. His eyes, like the chair, were oddly green. I’ll leave you to it.

The bathroom had a snub-nosed slipper tub and a toilet that flushed with a pull chain. At the bottom of the toilet bowl in pale-blue letters baked into the porcelain were the words Thomas Crapper—London, Ltd. Such a world, that has such toilets in it!

I put my laptop on the desk in the window and drew the curtains, to reveal another pair of curtains, and drew those curtains to reveal a sheer panel attached at both top and bottom. There were pubs on either side of Trevor’s place. I could hear the drinking Londoners on the street: conversation, blunt laughter. Two men moved in front of the window like burly shadow puppets, inches away from me. I could see their shapes but not details. Tenerife’s no good, one said to the other, bringing his pint glass to his mouth. Tenerife’s where I fucked up. I switched on the desk lamp, its glass shade the same Robin Hood green as the armchair. Peter Pan green. Poison green. If the drinkers had noticed me, I would have looked to them like an automatic fortune-teller in a box. Go back to Tenerife, I thought at the man outside, and find your true love. Perhaps I’d write this advice on the back of a business card and push it through a crack at the bottom of the window.

Never give up your metaphoric bad habits, the way your obsessions make themselves visible in your words. Tell yourself that one day a scholar will write a paper on them, an x-ray of your psyche, with all of your quirks visible like breaks in bones, both healed and fresh.

I took out the burner phone I owned for international travel, turned it off, and set it on my desk so that I wouldn’t be woken up by a middle-of-the-night text from America. The one person who might need me, the simmering emergency and joy of the past few years, my mother, was ten months dead. The last time I’d been to London was with her in 2016, after the presidential election but before the inauguration, on a lark of a Christmas trip. We’d had an exceptionally good time. I’d only minimally sniped at her. I’d let her make every decision and I’d picked up every check.

Condoling friends used the words grief and mourning. But neither was what I felt. All my life I’d heard people use those words to discuss the ordinary deaths of elderly people—or, worse, elderly animals—and (I am hard-hearted) I found them melodramatic. Those old people and dogs were never going to be immortal. Grief, as I understood it—grief and I were acquainted—is the kind of loss that sets you on fire as you struggle to put it out. My mother’s death hadn’t changed my mind. I just missed her. I hated to see her go. But she’d had a sweet end, or so I kept telling people, though who was I to speak for my mother? She’d hate that, my opinion about her experience. It was sweet for her family, at home with hospice nurses and cats, and friends around the bed, at a time—2018—when you couldn’t count on a sweet end but it wasn’t impossible.

At my Clerkenwell (Clarkenwall, Clarkenwell) desk, I read an email from the real estate agent who was going to try to sell my mother’s house in far-off Massachusetts. A crew of professionals had cleaned it, organized the contents, held an estate sale, and then swept all the leftover things into three dumpsters. The estate sale I had attended; the clean-out, as it was called, happened afterward, over weeks, though I hadn’t seen the pictures or heard how much the sale had netted. The real estate agent had grown up in the same Italian American neighborhood as I had (I was not Italian American), with the same sort of name as the boys from my elementary school, which is why I had picked him, though he was ten years older than me and my former classmates, a youngish senior citizen in a blue suit. I didn’t know him, a relief. One of my mother’s neighbors was keen to sell the house for me, had in fact met my mother while canvassing the street for houses to sell, had in fact emailed me to offer condolences and her services. I was tired of people who’d known my mother getting in touch with me, not because they had no claim but because they did. In London, I found I wanted to hoard my little portion of her. I didn’t write back to the neighbor, or to the Russian handyman who worked for my mother and wanted to know whether he should cut the lawn, or to his wife, an enthusiastic though incompetent house cleaner who brought my mother homemade chopped liver and loved her entirely. Mow the lawn? It was a reasonable question. I just didn’t want to answer it. I didn’t even write back to the real estate agent, whose daughter, he said, had taken pictures of the house: The listing would be up by the end of the American day. Let him list the house. Let it disappear without me noticing. It wasn’t a haunted house but a haunting one. It had haunted me a long time.

Bereaved. That I’d own up to. Bereaved suggests the shadow of the missing one, while grief insists you’re all alone. In London, I was bereaved and haunted.

The house was for sale. Soon I would have nothing to do with it.

I didn’t want to see the pictures. I didn’t want to work, either. I closed my laptop and felt the internet burble through the lid, felt it flow into my fingers and hectic wrists. The next day, I decided abruptly, I would spend the whole day out, just my internetless burner phone in my pocket. I would let the city fill my head, and I would be a person on the earth instead of on the internet. I loved the internet, no mistake—the natter, the burble, the possibility of offered love, the opportunity to ask for love and receive it, never unalloyed, perhaps only fool’s love, shining like the real thing, which was sometimes good enough even if it didn’t last so long. The thrill of finding fool’s love was still a thrill. The internet, or my relationship to it, had become a sixth sense, a shitty one, a power I used to divine things, sure, but also a prickling sensation in my organs: There is information out there, better find it! The monsters, too, whose power lived in the way they convinced you that you could defeat them with words they’d never read. I had a fantasy that someday I would meet one or two of these monsters, shake a hand, lean forward, and whisper the one thing each would most hate to hear. You do know you’re going to hell. Fat ass. Everyone can tell how stupid you are. God doesn’t love you. Your wife doesn’t love you. Your children will forget you. You’re going to hell. You’re going to hell. You’re going to hell.

As for myself, I didn’t believe in hell or an afterworld of any sort. What netherworld could be more nether than this one? I believed the afterlife was, as an atheist might tell a child curious about heaven, the memories of other people. How my mother would have hated that! To cede control to other people’s brains, when her own brain was what she trusted. Still, she loved being thought about.

You know, said the man on the other side of my window, the one who’d fucked up in Tenerife, that’s how it is. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah.

"But do you know what I mean?"

My mother distrusted memoirs and I wasn’t interested in the autobiographical and for a long time that made things easy. But writers change even if mothers don’t.

(Mothers change plenty. Don’t trust a writer who gives out advice. Writers are suckers for pretty turns of phrase with only the ring of truth.)

Everything makes more sense if you know what my parents looked like. My father was six foot three and, for the last forty years of his life, enormous in every dimension, three hundred pounds or more. Photos reveal that he was relatively thin for parts of my early childhood. That father, the one with a mustache and plenty of sandy-blond hair, has been replaced in my head by the white-bearded fat father, the one children on the street mistook for Santa Claus, which he enjoyed as long as a nearby parent didn’t say, You better be good, or he won’t bring you any presents! He was mostly shy. Some people were frightened by his size and silence; in my childhood I sometimes was. He had a stutter and a temper and an encyclopedic memory, a capacious metaphorical heart and an

Reviews for The Hero of This Book

[phyllis2779 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An OK book. A memoir posing as a novel. Pretty much a daughter's memories of her mother. Very interesting book club discussion. I like the writing but reading this book was uncomfortable for me, like a scratchy shirt.

[nivramkoorb · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is the 3rd book I have read by Elizabeth McCracken and it had gotten good reviews so I gave it a shot. A short book that the author tries to frame as fiction and not a memoir. Whatever, but the bottom line it is about McCracken's mom. Natalie(the mom) had to deal with a lot in life but the author shows the roses and thorns as she describes her mom and their relationship. The writing is excellent and for all of us who have lost parents it showed how little or large our relationships are. In this case McCracken had a close relationship with her mom and for me it gave me an insight into how varied our relationships are with our parents. Not a long read but if this a subject that. you might be interested in give it a try. I would suggest" The Souvenir Museum" as a good introduction to McCracken.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A quiet novella about a woman walking around London while remembering her parents, especially her mother, is not what one usually expects from Elizabeth McCracken whose books and short stories are all so delightfully weird and off-kilter. But, of course, the upbringing the narrator describes is both normal and very odd. This book does an excellent job of describing what it means to live with a disability and what it's like to live with a disabled parent. As the narrator walks around London, she remembers a previous trip with her mother and every place she goes is assessed for whether her mother would be able to access it. McCracken, as usual, writes very, very well and if you're in the mood for something quieter, you could do far worse than pick up this slender gem.

[bobbieharv · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

She's a wonderful writer, and "An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir" was a shimmering example. She takes pains here to tell us this is not a memoir, but it really was, and the dissembling is my only hesitation. Just a wonderful way to bring her mother back to life; to remember her.

[ccayne_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I used to say that the only thing I was afraid of was losing my mother even though I knew it was inevitable. Regardless of whether this is truth or fiction, it was a lovely reflection on family, love and all the complexity and contradictions which go along with it.

[cariola_6 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In the prefatory pages of her latest book, McCracken assures us that it is not a personal memoir and that she would never write about her mother, who was a very private person. The novel's narrator, an unnamed woman writer, then proceeds to tell us her memories of her recently deceased mother. She has decided to take a trip to London, her mother's favorite city, and at every turn thinks how her mother would have loved this quirky hotel clerk, that little corner pub, watching a play in the nosebleed section of the second balcony. Like most mothers and daughters, theirs was a complicated relationship, but a close and loving one. The writer's memories show us a tough, resilient woman who overcame her humble beginnings and physical limitations, who was smart and funny and loving, whose desire to protect her privacy turned her home into a decaying mausoleum to which visitors were unwelcome, despite het zest for life and curiosity about the world outside. What the writer comes to realize is that her mother was also her best friend and is dearly missed.Critical reviews keep remarking that The Hero of this Book is an exercise in what it means to be a writer. Maybe so. But I kept feeling instead that it was an exercise in reading fiction, a reminder not to fall into the trap of believing that an unnamed first person narrator is the writer herself, no matter how much she borrows from the lives of those around her.

[bookappeal · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Is it biography? fiction? memoir? It doesn’t matter. The author's ode to her mother is sad, funny, sometimes maddening. McCracken takes care with every word, every turn of phrase as she remembers various trips to London with her mother - a fascinating, strong, determinedly resilient woman - and comes to terms with her mother’s life and death. And imparts her thoughts about the art of writing along the way. A short but impactful read.

[hccpsk · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The unnamed main character in Elizabeth McCracken’s The Hero of This Book says it herself: “It’s not much of a plot. As a fictional character I do very little of consequence…” and then proceeds to go on a tangent about writing books with no plot. It’s only one of many times that The Hero feels more like a memoir than a novel, but the author reminds us this is not true. So if a middle-aged woman wandering around London reminiscing about her recently deceased mother sounds great, then grab this book. As always, McCracken’s writing is spot-on, witty, and delves deeply into the relationship between mother and daughter, but don’t expect anything to happen.

[jhscolloquium · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Is The Hero of This Book a work of fiction, a memoir, or a treatise on writing? It doesn't matter because it is an engaging, heartfelt tribute to a mother from the daughter who loved, admired, and was bemused by her. McCracken’s narrator considers various literary styles, insisting she is not a memoirist, and is not even sure about the difference between fiction and memoir. “Permission to lie; permission to cast aside worries about plausibility.” To her “emotionally autobiographical” fiction, the narrator has lent her secrets, but never her identity, out of fear of being found. Now she claims to have perhaps lost her inhibitions. Or not. (She equivocates about various topics throughout the narrative.) Her mother hated graves and therapy, and viewed memoirs with contempt, especially those replete with complaints about parents. But was fun-loving, adventurous, and “loved to tell stories about herself.” The fictional narrator remains anonymous throughout the book, but acknowledges that the “actual me is the author.” She describes how she wandered the streets of London during a return visit in August 2019, "the summer before the world stopped," feeling every bit the motherless child she became ten months earlier when her mother died. Yet she neither grieved nor mourned the mother whose name she also conceals until late in the story. She rejects the words "grief" and "mourning," finding both terms "melodramatic. . . . I just missed her. I hated to see her go." Back in Boston, her parents' belongings had been sold during an estate sale, and their house was being readied to be put on the market. "In London, I found I wanted to hoard my little portion of her" -- perhaps in the same way that her parents hoarded objects, although the narrator never uses that word in relationship to their living conditions or the monumental task of hauling their amassed belongings out of the house. Those belongings were curated to serve as “a bulwark to keep people away and out.” Rather, the trip was a means of escaping those mundane details of finalizing her mother's affairs. The house -- and, more specifically, the squalor in which her parents needlessly lived -- had haunted her for years. “At first the house was untidy, then messy, then dirty, then a shame, a shanda, then squalid. Actual squalor. . . . [I]t really was shameful, to be so educated, with such resources, and live in squalor.” She was happy to be away from it all and soon, hopefully, unburdened by it. "I was bereaved and haunted," she recalls. As the narrator details walking around London, remembering her mother and the extraordinary life she lived, McCracken often employs a stream of consciousness style, permitting the narrator to veer off on tangents while relating a story. The technique makes the tale believable and authentic. Anyone who has experienced the grief of losing a loved one will recognize aspects of their own experience in the narrator’s recollections of family members and events, and her efforts to come to terms with who her parents were and their legacy. Ordinary objects, words, prictures or specific locations can trigger memories that flood one's consciousness in jagged, disjointed, seemingly random order, as they do the narrator's. The narrator marvels at many aspects of her mother’s life and personality, as well as her physical characteristics. She remembers her mother saying she sustained a “birth injury” or “forceps injury,” but never a birth defect, and describes her mother’s refusal to let her body inhibit her lifestyle or accomplishments. She was formidable and personable, unique and memorable, and it is not until well into the story that the narrator names her mother’s condition – words she never heard her mother utter until she was fifty-eight years old and the narrator was twenty-six. Of course, to the narrator her “mother’s body was just her body,” and it surprised her when others noticed and/or commented about it, in part because of her mother’s personality. It was also just her body to her mother – never “something to overcome or accept any more than yours was.” In some respects, her mother’s death came as a surprise. After all her mother had overcome and accomplished in her life, the narrator “was awaiting another resurrection.” When she had to accept that her mother would not survive, she and her brother had to make decisions about her mother’s last days and care. And they chose well, observing that both of her parents had “good deaths . . . from this angle especially, a quiet death in old age, people you love nearby: It feels like luck.” If the definition of being lucky includes being survived by a child who remembers the years spent with you lovingly, even in recognition of your flaws and missteps, the narrator's parents were indeed lucky. She “hated to see them go” and, through the process of losing and missing them, illustrates the various ways in which she knew and understood her parents, while acknowledging that there was much about them, their lives, and their relationship she did not know. And will likely never know. It's another aspect of the narrator’s feelings with which readers who have lost parents will identify. In her grief, the narrator realizes that she “only knew the stories my mother liked to tell, not the ones she’d prefer to forget,” which is, perhaps, a universal parental trait. The Hero of This Book is an often hilarious and at times heartbreaking, beautifully crafted homage from an empathetic, bereaved daughter to her deceased mother (and, to a lesser degree, father, grandmother, and aunt). Thanks to McCracken's vivid and evocative prose, the narrator's parents and other family members spring back to life on the pages as McCracken details lives well-lived, along with personality quirks and eccentricities, and foibles. Her mother was ferociously private. The narrator wonders how her mother would react to the book, and ponders whether privacy outlives us. Ultimately, as with other weighty issues, she decides not to decide. Because concluding that the dead have no privacy might simply be a way to camouflage and justify her own self-centeredness. Besides, the narrator continues to keep many things secret and the book is her story -- a story she needs to tell -- even if her mother is the hero of it. And make no mistake: the narrator's brilliant, intellectual, stubborn, complicated, and unconventional mother is the undisputed hero of the book . . . and her daughter's life. The narrator’s ruminations never hit a false or contrived note, revealing her particular worldview and sometimes cheeky philosophies about writing. “I hate novels with unnamed narrators. I didn’t mean to write one. Write enough books and these things will happen. I never meant to write a novel about a writer, either.” She believes that life is all about story: “Your family is the first novel that you know.” Adult readers who are, like the narrator, motherless or orphaned children, may find themselves fondly recalling and missing their own parents as they get to know McCracken's perhaps fictional ones. I certainly did. Thenks to NetGalley for an Advance Reader's Copy of the book, and to Ecco Books & Bibliolifestyle for a paperback copy.

[nancyadair-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

My mother’s body was just her body….I can say that I don’t think it made much of a difference in my childhood.from The Hero of This Book by Elizabeth McCrackenMy mother was diagnosed with psoriasis at age sixteen. By the time she was twenty-seven she had lost joints to psoriatic arthritis. During my teenage years, the psoriasis sometimes covered 90% of her body, and in winter often found her bedridden.Mom asked me later in life if I had been embarrassed by her when growing up. I never saw her disease as ‘her’. As a girl, I knew my mom was the youngest and prettiest of all my girlfriends’ moms, with fashionable hair, red lipstick, her face unlined. My friends all liked her. She taught us to jitterbug. She listened to popular music and liked the latest fashions. I could answer, no, I was never embarrassed by my mom’s disease. Even thought I applied tar ointment or olive oil to her scalp to soak overnight, opened jars she could not grasp, I didn’t see her disability. I saw the mother who read late into the night, argued with neighbors over political issue, her generosity, her stubbornness.“Her body was her body. It wasn’t something to overcome or accept any more than yours was,” the narrator tells us about her mother whose ability to walk was stolen by disease and bad operations. The Hero of This Book is the narrator’s story of her mother, a strong willed, brilliant, flawed, eccentric woman.She did not let her disease limit her. When invited to a meeting she was told she was the only disabled person to have ever attended. There were elevators inside, she explained, but she had to crawl up the stairs to the building on her hands and knees. The daughter recalls their trips to the movies and the theater and abroad. She also contends wit her deceased parent’s home; they were hoarders and neither able or willing to clean the house. Fiercely private, they resented in home care.Reading, my mind returned again and again to my own mother, who died in 1991 at age fifty-seven of cancer.Mom often told me she did not want to live into an old age that found her unable to care for herself. Luckily, her last decade was better with an immunosuppressant drug. Her skin condition improved and the joint damage stabilized, although her fingers were already bent and her neck frozen into a permanent hunch. Her life had been one doctor and experimental treatment after another, interns coming in to see her unusual case.“Mom didn’t want people to see her dead body as she had so little privacy in life,” McCracken’s narrator tells us. And its exactly what my mom told me. When mom died in the hospital, I arrived to see family gathered in her room, crying. She was already gone. And I remembered her words and wanted to tell them to leave! Leave her alone!The narrator is a writer, not a mother, single, middle-aged. She talks about her life and her relationship to her mother, about her father and about his relationship to her mother. She refers to the complicated world we live in, “monsters everywhere, with terrible hair and red neckties.” About teaching and writing.McCracken’s book is a quiet read, with subtle humor and subtle pathos. It’s introspective, thoughtful. As I got into it, I found myself identifying more and more with the narrator. Loss is universal, coming to terms with the loss of a parent shared by us all. The details differ, but not the task of learning to cope with the loss.“I wish I could remember all the stories she told about herself,” the narrator tells us. Don’t we all.I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

[pomo58 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Hero of This Book from Elizabeth McCracken is a powerful and moving portrayal of working through grief both emotionally and intellectually.Anyone who has lost someone they love will recognize many of the elements of their own grieving process here. While we all grieve differently, there are still similarities to how we deal with our emotions, how we come to understand our new world intellectually, and especially in the area where these two meet. McCracken draws, no doubt, on her own loss to make this especially poignant.It seems there are some people who know both McCracken's life as well as her mother's to make the claim this is a memoir. Since a memoir consists of factual events told as accurately as the memoirist's memory can recall them, I am assuming these people KNOW that this book is full of actual events and not simply based on elements of McCracken's own journey into grief. Since I am not privy to those details, I will take McCracken's word for it that this is not a memoir. My guess is that she knows the difference between a memoir (of which she has already written one) and fiction (of which she has written plenty). And while writers are notoriously famous for being vague about their intentions in their writing, I just don't see enough to make me call her a liar. But these other knowledgeable people do, so...It really doesn't matter, taking this journey with the narrator (which I do believe is influenced by how McCracken is working through her own grief) is both impactful as a story as well as a catalyst for readers to reflect on their own lives. If you have suffered the loss of a close loved one, your tears and your smiles will be as much about your own life as the character's.I would highly recommend this to readers who like tightly written character driven stories that leave you exhausted and exhilarated in equal measure.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.