I spent last weekend with a close friend, close enough that I’d recently sent him a galley of my first novel—close enough that I certainly expected him to tell me he liked it, whether he actually liked it or not. When I met him at the airport, he graciously obliged: He was partway through, he said, and enjoying the book so far. To prove it, he cited a number of moments from the book’s first half, specifically the ones that were derived from stories he already knew, because he’s been my friend forever and has heard them before or, in many cases, was there when they happened. “Wow,” he said, in conclusion, “I never really thought about how when you’re writing a novel you have to use all your good stories.”
Well, I bristled a little. I am a novelist, sir! It says so, right on the cover: A Novel, in classy handwritten script. But in my heart, I know it’s true that this particular fiction contains an awful lot of nonfiction. Like many first novels (like many novels!) it’s a real grab bag: things that have happened to me, things that I’ve feared would happen to me, things that have happened to people I know, and things I made up—probably in roughly equal proportions—all remixed and recast to make narrative sense out of the characters I invented (but who also are sort of versions of me and people I know). “If I were smarter,” I told my friend ruefully, “I would have saved more things for later novels.”
Elizabeth McCracken knows all about how writers use their lives in their work. “I lacked imagination,” she writes in The Hero of This Book. “I still do. It’s a common failing in my line of work.” The “line of work” of this wonderful book’s narrator is novelist, and the narrator is Elizabeth McCracken, who is writing about her mother, Natalie. But: “This isn’t a memoir,” McCracken says, again and again. There it is, right on the cover of this slim volume: A Novel. Her mother, who died in 2018, didn’t like memoirs, McCracken writes. “Oh, those people who write memoirs about the worst thing that ever happened to them!” she was known to say, disgustedly.
Of course, writers have long been writing about their own lives and calling it fiction, since before we all started called it autofiction. Annie Ernaux just won a Nobel Prize for a nearly 50-year career that’s mixed fiction and memoir without caring, too much, about which is which or what it’s called. As Jessica Winter pointed out, though, in an essay in the Times—published on the occasion of her not-autobiographical-but-set-in-her-hometown novel, The Fourth Child—the assumption that every novel is a veiled memoir means that “critical reading can devolve into a tiresome kind of fact-checking.” What’s true? What isn’t? Can I catch the author in an error, or find a surprising congruence?
The Hero of This Book dispenses with all that crap right away. The novel opens with a photo of the title page of a copy of McCracken’s 1993 debut, signed “For Mom”: “who will never—no matter what she or anybody else thinks—appear as a character in my work.” By the second page, Elizabeth, on a trip to London less than a year after her mother’s death, meets the colorful hotelier of her Clerkenwell inn, “a gentle, blinky Englishman named Trevor, who might have been thirty and might have been fifty.” And then McCracken winks:
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.
The Hero of This Book is a loving, moving portrait of Natalie McCracken that doubles as a wry, helpful guide for any writer to not freak out so much about how to categorize what she is writing. McCracken has taught creative writing for many years, first at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and then at the University of Texas. She may downplay her expertise—“I enjoy reading other people’s work and having opinions,” she writes—but her pedagogical flair shines through. As does her mordant wit: “I don’t think writing is that hard,” she notes, “as long as you’re comfortable with failure on every single level.”
One of her failures, she says, is not to be able to memorialize her mother with a big, expansive novel that takes in her whole life, her whole self: “David Copperfield except Jewish.” The problem, though, is that “there’s too much I don’t know and I can’t bear to make up.” What good is imagination in the face of a loved one lost? All McCracken can imagine, on her tour of London, a city Natalie loved, is how her mom would respond to the London Eye or a production of Midsummer or an odd Thames-side elevator. That doesn’t make her feel better at all.
And yet in its 177 pages The Hero of This Book does sharply capture a remarkable person, a big-hearted, teensy woman who walked with crutches all her life, adored the theater, and lived in squalor because she couldn’t bear to throw anything away. (McCracken remembers finding, while cleaning out the kitchen, three waffle irons, even though her mother famously didn’t even like breakfast. “I make waffles all the time,” her mother snapped. “Put them back.”) Rather than the sweeping canvas of David Copperfield (except Jewish), it’s a pointillist portrait, made up of closely-observed detail. Natalie once took a helicopter tour of Miami and laughed the whole time. She had almost square feet. She disapproved of young adult literature (in a parenthetical, McCracken, a maestro of parentheticals, adds, “she believed they should be reading William Saroyan”). But even these are not enough, and toward the end of the book, McCracken gives us an entire chapter of details, sentence after sentence, a tactic that should be dulling—a daughter throwing everything she remembers onto the page—but instead feels wonderfully overwhelming, our final glimpse of this person we’ve come to love as well.
And at every turn, McCracken puckishly undercuts our expectations about the way a book like this should work. In grad school, she says, she once wrote a story directly from her life, one that her classmates accused of being rife with authorial intrusion—“a great aesthetic crime in the 1980s.” McCracken’s past that now. She gleefully intrudes on this novel, a novel that is itself an intrusion, she points out, on her mother’s privacy. Early in the book, at exactly the moment a teacher would tell a student that readers need a physical description of her first-person narrator, McCracken declares, “I will not look at myself in a mirror for you. I will not watch myself pass in a plate-glass window or imagine what a stranger thinks upon seeing me.” After a great bit of writerly advice, she interrupts herself: “Don’t trust a writer who gives out advice. Writers are suckers for pretty turns of phrase with only the ring of truth.”
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And late in the book she goes ahead and lets real life intrude upon the novel, the novel that is real life. She’s presented herself, throughout, as unmarried, an only child. But, she writes, that isn’t the actual her. “I have a brother, and some offspring, and am married.” (She never comes clean about the true story of “Trevor,” the hotelier.) “I love everyone and I want to keep them safe,” she adds. “Safe from me particularly.”
“Write what you know,” we tell young writers—advice, like all writing advice, that is both useful to follow and useful to reject. It’s in writing at the far edges of our own understanding that we find the most frightening, compelling material, but we’re also always writing from our own minds, our own lives, even when we’re writing about space aliens or whatever. My novel is nothing like The Hero of This Book—it’s definitely not as good, for starters—but it is also everything like The Hero of This Book, because it is a portrait of the people I’ve loved, told in the way I could tell it. “If you want to write a memoir without writing a memoir,” McCracken advises us, “go ahead and call it something else. Let other people argue about it.”
