An Exact Replica of My Imagination

Genre: Non-Fiction

I gave this book ****

This is the very sad story of McCracken’s first-born son’s death. He died in vitro at nine months and she had to deliver the baby, name him for his burial (they named him Pudding) and then bury him. All this happened while she and her husband lived in France as they moved there (both are authors) with the expressed purpose of writing their future books. The story takes the reader, in a circuitous route, through meeting her husband, marriage and then baby Pudding. It also reads as a travel diary, of sorts, as she tells about their experience living and traveling in France. She then tells us about the birth of her second boy, Gus. This story is that of heart ache and loss and learning to rejoin the living after tragedy befalls you.

This is a hard one. This book is very well-written and the story is certainly worth telling. But here’s the thing about tragedy and trauma in story-telling: it is only time that can heal us (so cliché, but so true) and propel us past the great abyss that is the heavy weight of depression. It is only once we are standing on the other side of this great abyss that we can look back at our experience and not just learn from it, but see it with a clearer vision. And this is what was missing. The story, while written well, was clearly written relatively soon after the death of Pudding and so there was recanting of what happened, but little more than that. I kept thinking that the story could have been written so differently five years after Pudding died or even 10 years after. Not the story of his death. He died, and nothing can change that. But how does McCracken see this life experience after having time and space away from it? I say this because, for me, books like this are about life lessons, and even though I may not have had the same experience as McCracken, it is her insight on life after Pudding that, I think, would have been important to share. That said, the writing is so very beautiful and the story telling in itself must have been cathartic and clearly personal.

I gave this book ****