An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination - Elizabeth McCracken

Elizabeth McCracken is an award winning, happily single author in her late thirties. But when she meets Edward Carey, they fall in love and get married. Both have wanderlust and it is in France where she discovers she is expecting their first child. They spend an idyllic nine months waiting for the birth of "Pudding", the pet name given to the unborn baby boy.

However, tragedy strikes at the eleventh hour. McCracken's son is stillborn.

How does one deal with such sorrow? How do you go forward?

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination is the story of that pregnancy and loss, written after birth of her second child, a little more than a year later.

"This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending."

I felt like I was privy to McCracken's journal, reading of the joy, anticipation, hurt, anger and grief that she and her husband went through. She is unwavering in her honesty, sharing her most intimate thoughts and emotions.

I haven't (yet) read any of her novels, but was captured by the way she uses words to paint vivid descriptions.

" Just then another would-be renter showed up, a yellow-clad lawyer from Boston, with wooden skin and leaden hair and the official dreary insinuating underfed brittle aura of a number 2 pencil".

Whether you are a parent or not, this is a personal and moving memoir that will touch you.

Visit my fellow bloggers Swapna and Carrie to hear what they thought about this new memoir from Hachette Books.