An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination_ A Memoir - Elizabeth McCracken [0]
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Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group, USA
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com.
First eBook Edition: September 2008
ISBN: 978-0-316-03980-2
Contents
Also by Elizabeth McCracken
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Acknowledgments
About the Author
ALSO BY ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN
The Giant’s House
Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry
Niagara Falls All Over Again
Once upon a time, before I knew anything about the subject, a woman told me that I should write a book about the lighter side of losing a child.
(This is not that book.)
I was giving a badly attended fiction reading at a public library in Florida. The woman wore enormous denim shorts, a plaid shirt, a black ponytail, and thumbprint-blurred glasses; her husband’s nervous smile showed off his sand-colored teeth. They latched on to me, the way the sad and aimless sometimes do: I haven’t been a public librarian myself for more than ten years now, but I retain what I like to think of as an air of civic acceptance. When the reading was over and the rest of the audience had dispersed (if five people can be said to disperse) she gave her suggestion. She really did say it, in a voice that seemed as thumbworn as her glasses: “You should write a book about the lighter side of losing a child. You’re very funny.”
I couldn’t imagine what she was getting at. A joke book for the bereaved? A comic strip guide to outliving your children?
For instance, she explained, her son was dead. Just recently she and Al — her husband, who smiled apologetically with those appalling choppers — had been on the beach, and Al had been eating a tuna sub, and a seagull came and stole part of the sandwich. And so she knew that the bird was the soul of her teenage son. Al nodded in agreement.
“And I laughed and laughed,” the woman said flatly. I was sitting at a table, having signed three books, one for a cheerful old lady who’d called my short stories pointless during the Q & A. Al’s wife had taken my place at the podium. She looked out at the empty chairs. “You should write a book with stories like that,” she said. “It would be a big hit.”
She was a childish, unnerving person. I imagined that she’d been trying people’s patience for some time. At first they would have been sympathetic, but after her son had been dead for a while, they’d grow weary of her bringing him up as though the calamity had just happened. Well-meaning friends would look uncomfortable at the very mention of his name. So she had to devise new and sneaky ways to work him into conversations with strangers, at book readings, at the grocery store, at train station information desks, to telemarketers. You have to move on, beige-toothed Al might have said, you can’t mourn forever. Then she could say, See? I’m not mourning: I’m laughing. I’m looking on the lighter side.
And now she wanted an instruction book.
It seemed like the saddest thing I’d ever heard, back before I knew how sad things could get.
A child dies in this book: a baby. A baby is stillborn. You don’t have to tell me how sad that is: it happened to me and my husband, our baby, a son.
Still, I’m coming around to understanding what that woman in Florida wanted.
A baby is born in this book, too. That is to