An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination
A Memoir

I think Elizabeth McCracken must be a gritty sort of person. I don't mean gritty as in eyeliner and dark poetry, mean streets and minor chords. I mean gritty in the sense of another book I've been reading lately, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, about stick-to-it-ness. Supposedly grit is......more

I read this book on a recommendation of a friend who is familiar with the fact that I have gone through a similar experience in my own life. I, too, have delivered a stillborn son. What is ironic is that I had ordered this book off of Amazon, and it was delivered (and I started reading it) the day b......more

A hard book to comment on, but I will say that I read it in one night/morning, as I suspect most people do who pick it up. Also: I would like to take all my lessons in how to handle maternal grief and anxiety (when/if I experience it) from a three-headed oracle of Rachel Zucker, Joan Didion, and Eli......more

I was surprised to see AN EXACT REPLICA... compared by a reviewer to THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING by Joan Didion: I can't think of two books which approach the same subject matter (the death of a loved one) more differently. Where Didion is most essentially writing about her own death--at least, the......more

A thin, beautiful, sad - but defiant - book about the loss of a baby. It begins with the flat warning: "Someone dies in this book. A baby." McCracken married her British husband in her late thirties and was thrilled to be living together in Bordeaux and pregnant with their first child (nicknamed Pud......more