An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir - Couverture rigide

"Reading it is a mysteriously enlarging experience. It could pair neatly with Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking: it's hard to imagine two more rigorous, unsentimental guides to enduring the very bottom of the scale of human emotion." (Time Lev Grossman)

"Stunning...it is a triumph of her will and her writing that she has turned her tragedy into a literary gift." (PW (Starred Review))

"What an extraordinary book - joy and sorrow all mixed together on every page. Elizabeth McCracken is amazing." (Mameve Medwed, author of Of Men and Their Mothers)

"'A child dies in this book: a baby,'" Elizabeth McCracken tell us early on, so that we we might not hope too much, as she has, for the beautiful child who would grace her life. Alert to every nuance of feeling, McCracken writes with such clarity and immediacy that we hope anyway. 'It's a happy life,' she says, 'and someone is missing.' That these statements can both be true is the mark of great emotional maturity, and of a writer who rises to the human complexity of grief with all her powers, and all her heart." (Mark Doty, author of Dog Years)

"In AN EXACT REPLICA OF A FIGMENT OF MY IMAGINATION, Elizabeth McCracken does not howl out her loss. She is devastatingly calm and in this matches measure for measure her own fine writing. By the end of this memoir you will have held a beautiful child in your hands and you will have acknowledged him. This book is an extraordinary gift to us all." (Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon)

"[A] fascinating, word-perfect and bittersweet memoir." (Miami Herald Elinor Lipman)

"This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending," writes Elizabeth McCracken in her powerful, inspiring memoir. A prize-winning, successful novelist in her 30s, McCracken was happy to be an itinerant writer and self-proclaimed spinster. But suddenly she fell in love, got married, and two years ago was living in a remote part of France , working on her novel, and waiting for the birth of her first child.
This book is about what happened next. In her ninth month of pregnancy, she learned that her baby boy had died. How do you deal with and recover from this kind of loss? Of course you don't--but you go on. And if you have ever experienced loss or love someone who has, the company of this remarkable book will help you go on.
With humor and warmth and unfailing generosity, McCracken considers the nature of love and grief. She opens her heart and leaves all of ours the richer for it.