A&E

'An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination'

Elizabeth McCracken

(LB, $19.99)

Like Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, McCracken's new book is a powerful and defiant memoir of grief. For her, sorrow came in 2006 with the mysterious death of her baby boy during the ninth month of pregnancy. She and her husband lived in France then, and as they staggered through the ensuing weeks, McCracken was acutely aware of what she felt, what was said, what was done, what wasn't said and done. Her book isn't maudlin, nor does it spurn laughter (if there is a God, she says, "the most basic proof of his existence is black humor"), and surely it will give comfort to readers who've lost children. But it also will comfort anyone capable of being humbled by the fierce spectacle of a mother's love. Life goes on, McCracken says, but "death goes on, too," and "a person who is dead is a long, long story." Still, the people who live that story survive. "The frivolous parts of your personality, stubborner than you'd imagined, will grow up through the cracks in your soul."