The death of a parent is always a seismic event in anyone’s life. It brings into focus the relationship we had with them, and the stories we tell ourselves and others about our lives and our connections. As Elizabeth McCracken writes in her ‘not a memoir’ – The Hero of This Book – our families are the first novel that we ever encounter.
That idea of family as story is what underpins this novel, but while we may wish to tell stories about our connections that are complete and which make narrative sense, that is rarely the position most of us find ourselves in. Natalie, the mother of the book’s unnamed narrator, has recently died. The narrator travels to London, a city her mother loved, as a partial act of remembrance and sense-making. It is the summer of 2019, the year before Covid brought the world to a standstill, and although there is a sense of things falling apart, no one is yet aware of what the next few years will hold.
The narrator takes a walk around the city, roughly following a route that she took with her mother when they visited three years earlier. Her memories loop around as she visits the Tate, takes a ride on the London Eye and finds herself sharing a capsule with a family on an 80th birthday party outing, drinks Prosecco, and watches the mudlarkers in the Thames.
Her memories are impressionistic, incapable of holding the complexities of an individual; the narrator has always promised she will never turn her mother into a character in one of her books. The narrator is herself a writer and expresses her awareness of how tedious it is when writers write novels about other writers. For the most part, they are not the kind of people who have adventures. They are solitary souls with a tendency towards misanthropy. Their working day is spent looking at a laptop screen. Get a group of writers together, and they become insufferable. Like McCracken, she has little time for talk of craft.
The picture of the late mother that is painted is one of a vibrant, contrary, and brilliant woman. Her ‘just get on with it’ attitude gave her a healthy contempt for therapy culture, and alongside that a strong dislike of memoir. Which is perhaps why the narrator of this story is so adamant that this is not a memoir. It is fictional, and stories mined from real life can easily be made so, merely through the invention of a single fictional character. You can then call your book a novel, removing any sense of duty you felt towards authenticity, even if such a thing were possible.
McCracken’s own mother died in 2018, and we are left wondering how much of this is autobiographical. The narrator insists it isn’t, and just when you’re searching around for another means of understanding what it is you’re reading, she closes down autofiction as a possibility.
The insistence throughout that this is a novel is undermined by the narrator’s own musings over genre. In doing so, the novel gets to the heart of the creative process, and the way in which writers mine their own lives for stories. When does an anecdote become a fiction? We all tacitly accept that when we hear and tell stories, they may not always be completely accurate, and that they can change in the telling, but there is probably a kernel of something important in what we’re being told.
London serves as a framework through which these themes are explored. Being a child and a parent is perplexing. I sometimes envy people who can look at their parents and claim with certainty that they were either some kind of saint or completely demonic. I am often unsure how I am meant to remember my own late parents. There was much about them that I admired, and there are aspects of how they were that I choose to gloss over, or which I can still find hurtful. I’m sure when they thought about me, they probably had a similar complexity of feelings wrapped up in love for a child.
While being someone’s child is something we all experience (even if we experience it as a complete absence) the particularities of that relationship are unique. I feel differently about my parents to how I did when they were alive, and since they have died, my understanding of them has evolved again. I’m unsure how accurate my memories are now, and how much I create the parents that I need to sustain particular narratives about my own life.
The beauty of The Hero of This Book, is that is explores the complexities of being someone’s child, living in their shadow, and trying to make sense of where you fit in but never really reaches a conclusion, because we can never reach a conclusion.
The narrator approaches this task as a writer and teacher, aware that the tools and conventions that those roles give you, may be too blunt and narrowly conceived to contain the complexities of a human life.
In an ideal world, the narrator would be able to sit down and write a satisfying complete novel about her mother’s life;
“David Copperfield except Jewish, and disabled, and female, and an American wiseacre, but there’s too much I don’t know and I can’t bear to make up”.
Her mother, she concludes, is too good to become a mere character, even if her life is likely to provide fertile ground for mining material.
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