This brief but high impact book is a n excellent display of navigating grief in the short term - but not the immediate. Losing a parent is difficult no matter the circumstances, and Elizabeth McCracken brings her characteristic voice to this challenging and difficult topic.

I am sorry for the inconvenience but I don’t have the time to read this anymore and have lost interest in the concept. I believe that it would benefit your book more if I did not skim your book and write a rushed review. Again, I am sorry for the inconvenience.

Is it or isn't it her mom? That's mostly what i heard about this book prior to reading it and who cares is my response. Great book! Many thanks to publisher and to NetGalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion

This is a book I should have liked, but I did not gel with it. Good writing, great premise...but I still wasn't feeling it. So many others have loved this book, that I imagine it is me. I think I will put this on my "try again" list, as I often find revisiting books when in a different head space can really change how you relate to them. Thank you NetGalley and publishers for providing a digital ARC for review.

Fiction or not, Elizabeth McCracken has written a lovely homage to her mother and mothers everywhere. We follow along on a recreation of a vacation taken with her mother before her death. It is her way of processing her grief and dealing with the complicated aftermath of losing a parent. Anyone who has lost a beloved parent will find The Hero of this book to be a heartwarming read.
I received a drc from the publisher via NetGalley.

Quick read. She is a relatable narrator, even though you never learn her name. She speaks of her parents with great affection, especially her mother, while remaining fully aware they are not without flaws. Her account of how you feel when you lose your parents is familiar and unique.

It’s interesting when so many memoirs, or in this case, fictional memoirs focus on how different the main character is from their families that this narrator did not attempt to distance herself from her family of origin.

The fictional “writer” who narrates the novel writes a memoir while eschewing the genre. She travels to London ten months after her mother’s death -- a trip that is both nostalgic for a previous one with her mother and her first real solo venture, but one still viewed through her mother’s eyes.

Reading this book inspired me to look for other works by this author. I’m happy she has enough of a backlist to keep me busy for a while. I’ll likely start with Niagara Falls All Over Again because I live nearby and can never resist a local connection.

I received this Advanced Reader Copy of The Hero of This Book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

#TheHeroofThisBook #NetGalley

I absolutely love a novel that has the main character examine a person in their life as a whole person--in this case, not just as a mother, but as a whole complicated person. McCracken is a gem.

The hero of this book is the unnamed narrator’s mother, who died ten months before the narrator writes the book. The narrator is a writer, making the story a thinly veiled rendering of Elizabeth McCracken’s own life, whose mother died in 2018. McCracken writes somewhat self-consciously, informing the reader that the book can’t be a memoir because she does not want the pressure to get every fact right, and although her mother did not approve of memoirs because of how they destroyed a person’s privacy, the narrator of this book feels that writing about her mother’s life will allow her to live on. As the book opens the narrator checks herself into a hotel in London where she has decided to go by herself to grieve her mother and reminisce on trips that the two took in the past. Between descriptions of her travels, the narrator recounts more intimate details of her mother’s past, from her childhood as a Jewish woman in Iowa with cerebral palsy to a brief stint in acting to a fulfilling career in academia. The book is a beautiful love letter to the memory of the narrator’s mother, warts and all, and a moving reflection on love, relationships, and mourning.

I' loved Elizabeth McCracken's last short story collection, The Souvenir Museum, so I had high hopes for this well-regarded novel (memoir?). I very much enjoy her distinct writing style, and the strong sense of place for the London setting, and while a memorable read, something fell a little flat for me overall, which I'm having a difficult time putting my finger on, even processing for a couple weeks. I did appreciate the blurred lines between memoir and fiction, but maybe spoon fed to the reader a few too many times?

Three and a half stars rounded down, though certainly will continue to read McCracken's future works, this one was just not my favorite.

Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and publisher for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Is it a memoir or a novel? It's still not very clear even after reading.

I also lost my mother recently and I was hoping to have a bigger emotional reaction to this one. Instead I found myself wondering what the author was trying to do here. My mother was also my hero, I just wish the author had been more direct with her intentions.

I'm always attracted to autofiction, but this book was a notch above what I've previously read in the genre. In addition to its experimental narrative style, it has so much heart and tenderness, making it feel more emotional and earnest. I've recommended this book to so many readers and have heard nothing but positive feedback in response.

McCracken straddles the line between novel and memoir in a work whose heart is a love letter to her extraordinary mother. The author explores her own wonder, joy, loss, and peace as she reflects on the formidable woman after her death.

After her larger-than-life mother's death, the narrator of The Hero of This Book faces the sale of the family home in New England and travels to her mother's favorite city, London.

She considers whether her role as an author offers an opportunity to write about her mother and gain deeper understanding of her, or whether doing so would violate her mother's long-held, fierce desire for privacy.

The Hero of This Book straddles the line between fiction and memoir, as the book feels like a deeply felt love letter to McCracken's own mother Natalie, yet the book jacket clearly states that it is "A Novel."

The narrator/McCracken states how much her mother detested memoirs, and The Hero of This Book even includes a photo of a prior McCracken book's dedication: "For Mom: who will never—no matter what she or anybody else thinks—appear as a character in my work."

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.
Yet the novel structure feels like a way for McCracken to free herself from her lifelong promise not to write about her mother in order to share scenes from her mother's extraordinary spirit and life.

In The Hero of This Book the author shares recollections and imagined current encounters with her mom, refusing to allow her many vivid memories of her formidable, funny, striking mother to slip away without documentation--while acknowledging that she couldn't possibly tell the full story of her mother's life because there is too much she doesn't know. The blurred line between fact and fiction allows the true heart of the book, a daughter's wonder, grief, joy, and yearning for her lost mother, to shine.

I love how McCracken's books feel like peeks into the way her mind works; she lays bare the underpinnings of a small or a complex situation so skillfully, I highlight endless passages; her humor is wonderfully biting; she acknowledges her weaknesses and pokes fun at herself; she breaks your heart with the messy, gorgeous, complicated truth of living in the world.

I received a prepublication edition of this book, published October 4, courtesy of Ecco and NetGalley.

McCracken is also the author of The Giant's House, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination (to be reviewed on this site soon), Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry, and other books.

I mentioned one of McCracken's short story collections, Thunderstruck & Other Stories, in the Greedy Reading List Six Short Story Collections to Wow You.

The Hero of This Book, by Elizabeth McCracken, is an interesting read to say the least.. Is it a memoir or is it fiction? The author says it isn’t a memoir but it reads like one. Never the less it is a story about a woman and her parents and looking back on their lives. The woman, a writer is in London after her mothers death and reminisces about how complicated her parents were. She was loved, she know that for sure but they were quirky. As an only child, she had come to help her parents more and more. Trips from TX to Boston were a frequent and her relationship with her parents morphs into something else. Over all the author does a great job of telling this family’s story. Whether they are a real family or not, doesn’t really matter in the end. The writing was excellent and the characters were very interesting. They were flawed but loving, which seems so honest. This was a four star read for me. I want to thank Netgalley & the author for my copy for an honest review. It was my pleasure to read and review.

This was my first Elizabeth McCracken and will certainly not be my last. This read like a memoir in the best way. It was a beautiful exploration of a mother daughter relationship after the loss of the mother. I challenge anyone that ever had a mother to read this and not feel something.

Is The Hero of This Book a work of fiction, a memoir, or a treatise on writing? It doesn't matter because it is an engaging, heartfelt tribute to a mother from the daughter who loved, admired, and was bemused by her. McCracken’s narrator considers various literary styles, insisting she is not a memoirist, and is not even sure about the difference between fiction and memoir. “Permission to lie; permission to cast aside worries about plausibility.” To her “emotionally autobiographical” fiction, the narrator has lent her secrets, but never her identity, out of fear of being found. Now she claims to have perhaps lost her inhibitions. Or not. (She equivocates about various topics throughout the narrative.) Her mother hated graves and therapy, and viewed memoirs with contempt, especially those replete with complaints about parents. But was fun-loving, adventurous, and “loved to tell stories about herself.”

The fictional narrator remains anonymous throughout the book, but acknowledges that the “actual me is the author.” She describes how she wandered the streets of London during a return visit in August 2019, "the summer before the world stopped," feeling every bit the motherless child she became ten months earlier when her mother died. Yet she neither grieved nor mourned the mother whose name she also conceals until late in the story. She rejects the words "grief" and "mourning," finding both terms "melodramatic. . . . I just missed her. I hated to see her go." Back in Boston, her parents' belongings had been sold during an estate sale, and their house was being readied to be put on the market. "In London, I found I wanted to hoard my little portion of her" -- perhaps in the same way that her parents hoarded objects, although the narrator never uses that word in relationship to their living conditions or the monumental task of hauling their amassed belongings out of the house. Those belongings were curated to serve as “a bulwark to keep people away and out.” Rather, the trip was a means of escaping those mundane details of finalizing her mother's affairs. The house -- and, more specifically, the squalor in which her parents needlessly lived -- had haunted her for years. “At first the house was untidy, then messy, then dirty, then a shame, a shanda, then squalid. Actual squalor. . . . [I]t really was shameful, to be so educated, with such resources, and live in squalor.” She was happy to be away from it all and soon, hopefully, unburdened by it. "I was bereaved and haunted," she recalls.

As the narrator details walking around London, remembering her mother and the extraordinary life she lived, McCracken often employs a stream of consciousness style, permitting the narrator to veer off on tangents while relating a story. The technique makes the tale believable and authentic. Anyone who has experienced the grief of losing a loved one will recognize aspects of their own experience in the narrator’s recollections of family members and events, and her efforts to come to terms with who her parents were and their legacy. Ordinary objects, words, prictures or specific locations can trigger memories that flood one's consciousness in jagged, disjointed, seemingly random order, as they do the narrator's.

The narrator marvels at many aspects of her mother’s life and personality, as well as her physical characteristics. She remembers her mother saying she sustained a “birth injury” or “forceps injury,” but never a birth defect, and describes her mother’s refusal to let her body inhibit her lifestyle or accomplishments. She was formidable and personable, unique and memorable, and it is not until well into the story that the narrator names her mother’s condition – words she never heard her mother utter until she was fifty-eight years old and the narrator was twenty-six. Of course, to the narrator her “mother’s body was just her body,” and it surprised her when others noticed and/or commented about it, in part because of her mother’s personality. It was also just her body to her mother – never “something to overcome or accept any more than yours was.”

In some respects, her mother’s death came as a surprise. After all her mother had overcome and accomplished in her life, the narrator “was awaiting another resurrection.” When she had to accept that her mother would not survive, she and her brother had to make decisions about her mother’s last days and care. And they chose well, observing that both of her parents had “good deaths . . . from this angle especially, a quiet death in old age, people you love nearby: It feels like luck.” If the definition of being lucky includes being survived by a child who remembers the years spent with you lovingly, even in recognition of your flaws and missteps, the narrator's parents were indeed lucky. She “hated to see them go” and, through the process of losing and missing them, illustrates the various ways in which she knew and understood her parents, while acknowledging that there was much about them, their lives, and their relationship she did not know. And will likely never know. It's another aspect of the narrator’s feelings with which readers who have lost parents will identify. In her grief, the narrator realizes that she “only knew the stories my mother liked to tell, not the ones she’d prefer to forget,” which is, perhaps, a universal parental trait.

The Hero of This Book is an often hilarious and at times heartbreaking, beautifully crafted homage from an empathetic, bereaved daughter to her deceased mother (and, to a lesser degree, father, grandmother, and aunt). Thanks to McCracken's vivid and evocative prose, the narrator's parents and other family members spring back to life on the pages as McCracken details lives well-lived, along with personality quirks and eccentricities, and foibles. Her mother was ferociously private. The narrator wonders how her mother would react to the book, and ponders whether privacy outlives us. Ultimately, as with other weighty issues, she decides not to decide. Because concluding that the dead have no privacy might simply be a way to camouflage and justify her own self-centeredness. Besides, the narrator continues to keep many things secret and the book is her story -- a story she needs to tell -- even if her mother is the hero of it. And make no mistake: the narrator's brilliant, intellectual, stubborn, complicated, and unconventional mother is the undisputed hero of the book . . . and her daughter's life.

The narrator’s ruminations never hit a false or contrived note, revealing her particular worldview and sometimes cheeky philosophies about writing. “I hate novels with unnamed narrators. I didn’t mean to write one. Write enough books and these things will happen. I never meant to write a novel about a writer, either.” She believes that life is all about story: “Your family is the first novel that you know.” Adult readers who are, like the narrator, motherless or orphaned children, may find themselves fondly recalling and missing their own parents as they get to know McCracken's perhaps fictional ones. I certainly did.

I'm not going to lie, I am a huge Elizabeth McCracken fan. When I first read The Giant's House, I didn't think she could write anything better, but she has proven me wrong again and again. This story, told by a writer about her relationship with her mother—not a memoir, as the narrator so coyly tells us—really hit home for me, having lost my own mother just two years ago. And, while I won't assume this is a precise account of her McCracken's mother's life and death (though the details line up nicely), I will say that it is a perfect tribute to what seems to have been an amazing life. McCracken's prose is breathtaking in the small details, and I frequently stopped just to appreciate the spare beauty of her writing. I highly recommend this book.

I really really wanted to love this book like so many of my fellow readers did, but unfortunately, this one didn’t quite work out for me. Don’t get me wrong — Elizabeth McCracken is a great writer and her ability to use humor in the cleverest of ways is one of the things that I appreciate most about her works (this book was no exception). I also found the premise of the story very touching, with McCracken’s indirect tribute to her mother through the narrator’s recounting of her her memories (though of course, as McCracken makes clear, this is not a memoir, and the narrator, though also a writer who shares other similar details with herself, is technically not her). Having said that, the story overall was a bit hard to follow, as there wasn’t much of a plot — it was mostly the narrator’s thoughts and memories that would jump back and forth from past to present. It actually got to the point where I would be halfway through the book and have no idea what I just read. There were also moments where I had to stop reading in order to attend to a life issue, but then afterwards, I didn’t really feel like picking the book back up again (though of course, I eventually did pick it up and finish, since I have a problem with DNFing books once I start them).

While overall I was glad to have read this — and there were certainly aspects I related to and appreciated, such as the narrator’s complicated relationship with her mother and also trying to reconcile that with her sensibilities as a writer (hence the struggle of whether to actually write about her mother or not) — the back and forth was a bit too much for me. At times, the story felt like it was all over the place and that ended up detracting from the emotional aspect a bit.

Even though this one fell a little short for me, I’m still interested in reading McCracken’s other works at some point and having a different reading experience.

Received ARC from Ecco Press via NetGalley.

Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for an advance copy of this book.
The Hero of This Book by Elizabeth Mc Cracken is a memoir/novel about Elizabeth's relationship with her mother. as she examines things after her passing. Elizabeth is unabashedly honest in her storytelling. She is descriptive in regard to her parents; you feel as if they are part of your own family.

This may not have been the best choice to read when It was the anniversary of my beloved mom's death. The writing was good and some chapters really resonated with me. Depressing at times for the already depressed. McCracken is still a go to author.

Copy provided by the publisher and NetGalley

This may be my favorite book this year. Maybe. Probably.

I read a few reviews by folks confused about whether this book was a memoir. It is certainly clever how the author denies such a claim, as she doesn't want to reveal too much about her mother. Her mother was private and would not have wanted anything less than her best written about her. And I get that. My mother was not unlike the hero of this book in that regard. And yet, that is likely all they had in common. The narrator, though, wants to write about the mother, because it keeps her alive. And I understand that so much.

On p. 142 the author explains: "...When I write about my mother and my family and worry whether I have the right, I assure myself, I am only one person. Every one person is allowed their own story.

Some members of a family might never really trust the writer in their midst. With good reason? You tell me.

By which I mean: the fictional me is unmarried, an only child, childless. The actual me is not. (The fictional me is the narrator of this book. the actual me is the author. All Cretans are liars; I myself am a Cretan.) No, I'm telling the truth now, I swear. I have a brother, and some offspring, and am married. I love everyone and I want to keep them safe, safe from me particularly..."

After my own mother died (and this is an indulgent digression), I tried to read books on death and grief and morning, and little helped (with the very big exception being H Is for Hawk). This book more than made up for all of the others.

This book is short and sweet and also succinct, and I nearly read it within 24 hours. I always enjoy the work of Elizabeth McCracken (as a bookseller I recommended the hell out of The Giant's House), but I really really love this book.. And the hero of this book? Wow, what a force to be reckoned with. What a fantastic character to read.