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An Exact Replica Of A Figment Of My Imagination (2008)

by Elizabeth McCracken(Favorite Author)

4.09 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0316027677 (ISBN13: 9780316027670)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Little Brown and Company

review 1: I was going to start out by saying that this book isn't for everyone, but maybe, it should be for everyone. Specifically, it chronicles the author's life and first pregnancy leading up to the stillbirth of her son. It continues through to the birth of her second child. While I haven't had a stillbirth, I have suffered multiple miscarriages and have felt that I too was inaugurated into that secret society of loss and loneliness. This book offered me great, great comfort. Great, great comfort. It was so brave for her to share those horrendous and lonely feelings off walking through the obgyn's office not wanting to sully or frighten the women in the waiting room about to have successful births. Or the pain of writing down on the forms how many times you've been pregnant, and... more then next to it, a lower number for how many live births you've had. It was as though she was caressing my hand through those memories and saying, you were not alone. McCracken said that she wished she had a calling card, after she lost her first son, that she could simply hand to people so that she wouldn't need to form the words herself. She later states that this book is her calling card. It is for me too. It is a true gift of generosity to publicly share these losses. I thank her for it.
review 2: A tender book that granted much insight into stillbirth and losing a baby. I was warned about language, and it appeared seldom, but it was strong and shocking (but understandable) to me. Elizabeth McCracken describes her own character and her insight into who she is and why and how she dealt with this painful loss. I appreciated how she told the story and held back the reason her baby died until toward the end. She is a talented writer and I appreciate her writing a memoir. In this book she talks about one keeping in touch with one of her friends and I realized that Ann is Ann Patchett, another talented author. I loved reading Elizabeth's enchanting experiences of living in Paris and London and how she wrote that they lived in poor-author's housing conditions (whatever they could afford at the moment or something similar to that.) I especially appreciated Elizabeth writing sincerely about her excitement and anticipation for and affection toward her future unborn baby and then accompanying that beauty with the devastation and emptiness and anger of her visions of life crashing without a moments notice. I felt that so intensely when faced with Jeremy's injury. It happened so fast and everything I imagined was over and had to be recreated and faced somehow. Elizabeth does an amazing work of building the experience for someone else to read and visualize clearly. less

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