Sometimes books just demand to be read.
I'm a bit divided with my reading choices for this blog. I think ideally it would encompass a wide range of books and writers. Realistically, although I do like to read many different things, I do have my own particular literary palette. Sometime it's more narrow than broad. So this week I'm back to Elizabeth McCracken, because once I discovered that this book existed, I felt I just had to read it.
That also surprised me. This is a memoir about a particular experience, that of stillbirth. I don't have any children. I would not think that it would be something that I would read about in-depth. But I had recently read her novel, Niagra Falls All Over Again, and I loved the way that she used language. When I read the sample chapter from this book, I had no choice but to continue.
It was an ingenious opening. it took place in a library, long before McCracken was married, long before this pregnancy. She is presiding over an ill attended reading. A couple approaches her. The woman suggests that McCracken should write about children who die. She tells McCracken that her child has died, and then she tells an inappropriate antecdote of her life since her child has died. It is one of those moments that are unfortunately memorable, one of those times where when the author's life boomerangs with that remembrance later on, and this isolated incident, seemingly so trivial and strange, becomes something meaningful
McCracken has a gift for seeing humor in grief. She and her husband were living in France during this pregnancy, a place of great happiness for them prior to this event, a place, she says, where she will never return. Even admidst the bleakest moments, she and her husband seem compelled to find a twist. There is a language gaffe involving nuns and dwarves or a black cat runs out in front of them after they hear the news. ("Too late," her husband calls out to the cat.)
There are things that I had never thought about before, the reality that if your child is a stillborn, that you still have to go through the experience of delivering your child. There is also the decision of seeing the baby, the familiarity of this child now gone. McCracken writes from a position of strength, of grief, of outrage. She possesses that gift from her past life as a librarian. She catalogues ideas and actions. She lists in a very exact manner what happened and why. She is a wonderful guide through this experience.
I do wish the book had been edited more tightly. The story rambles at times, I think, and perhaps it's because the event is so sad that we need to meander a bit and go out of sequence and approach it from all sorts of angles. Sometimes I wanted to dig in my heels and say, "No more circling back. Whoa! Why are we going back here?" and "Do you really want to say that about your friend? I know she disappointed you, but does it need to be in print?"
It was one of those books where I laughed, gasped, and had the audacity to want to make changes. It was a true reading experience, one that I felt compelled to have.
