THE HERO OF THIS BOOK

“Your family is the first novel that you know.”

Meandering about London in the summer of 2019, 10 months after the death of her mother, McCracken’s nameless (maybe!) narrator recounts episodes from her mother’s extraordinary life and their quirk-filled family. Like all good stories, it’s complicated, and the mother in question was brilliant, stubborn, bad with money, secretive, and oppositional. Yet she was more fun than anyone else her daughter knew. Challenged by daunting physical limitations due to an injury with forceps when she was born, the older woman expended efforts to lead an active and successful life that could be considered heroic. (The achievement of “fun” seems superheroic.) Braided into McCracken’s gorgeously spiraling narrative is an expansive meditation on the act of writing and, intriguingly, the art of writing memoir. Beginning with the dedication page (a photograph of an inscription—written in McCracken's first book—to her mother, in which McCracken promises her she’d never appear as a character in her daughter’s work), the novel assumes a hybrid quality that could be called autofiction but really is an homage to the art of great storytelling. The meta-dilemma caused by one character’s hatred of memoir and books “blaming” parents and another’s need to tell a story provides a broad stage upon which McCracken’s characters (whoever they may be) can deliver their frustrations, realizations, and appreciations. Though bereaved, McCracken’s narrator unfolds her journey through London, and the story of her sometimes-maddening relationship with her parents as they aged, with attention to specific human detail. There is no danger here of any character becoming the disembodied “sentient, anguished helium balloons” McCracken’s narrator warns her writing students against creating.

Novel? Memoir? Who cares. It’s a great story, beautifully told.