Read: An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir

I’ve been on a mad race, plowing through several books this past week.

I started Elizabeth McCracken’s An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir on a tennis court. The husband and three other friends were playing a game of doubles and as tennis player no. 5 (and who only re-started playing tennis a few months ago after many many years’ lapse), I sat it out and picked up my book. Unfortunately, the weather was getting too cold to be standing around reading, so I only managed a few pages. But I continued with this book full of sadness on Sunday.

“This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending.”

It’s one of those books that I wanted so much to read, yet it sounded so incredibly sad, and it was, that it made me wonder how I could go on reading it. It was heartbreaking, it was funny, it was sweet, and most of all, it was so sad. How else could one describe a book in which a baby is stillborn? What a brave thing to do, writing about this painful experience. How does one, how does anyone, come to terms with such a situation?

“Every day as I love this baby in my lap, I think of my other baby. Poor older brother, poor missing one. I see the infant before me, the glory of the soles of the feet, the lips fattened and glossy with nursing, the nose whose future Edward and I try to predict daily. The love for the first magnifies the love for the second, and vice versa.”

This book will make you weep. It will make you tear. It will not be an easy read. But this is also a book that is filled with such love, such tenderness, such emotion. McCracken hasn’t just written a memoir, but a love song. A love song to her baby Pudding and her baby Gus. She writes it with such clarity and doesn’t wallow in self-pity. This review hardly does justice to this book but I do know that it would be such a shame to pass this book by.

Source: Library

This is my fifth read for the Women Unbound Challenge


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