The Hero of This Book: A Novel

"Decades ago, Elizabeth McCracken promised her fiercely private mother that she would never write about her. So this posthumous tribute is a lightly fictionalized memoir that interrogates genre and the act of writing as it conjures up her mother – the hero of this book – in all her splendid idiosyncrasy. It features the snappy prose and oddball sensibility we’ve come to love in McCracken’s novels and stories. “Why do I write?” her barely disguised narrator asks. “To try to get human beings on a page without the use of vivisection or preservatives or a spiritualist’s props.” Mission accomplished, delightfully."