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Short story author and novelist Elizabeth McCracken has just published a book, The Hero of This Story, in which the main character is Natalie Jacobson McCracken, educator, writer, and former editor-in-chief of Boston University alumni magazine, Bostonia. Elizabeth herself is the narrator of this novel. And, also, the daughter of Natalie. In the novel. In real life.
To make matters even more interesting, I worked as Natalie’s assistant from 2000 to 2003 and know Elizabeth via her mother. In this interview, Elizbeth and I discuss her new novel, the mechanics of fiction, and reminisce about a person we dearly love, one who was, well… extraordinary. Not only because of her brilliance, her big character and heart, but also because, for her entire life, she overcame the limitations of lifelong cerebral palsy with determination, good cheer, and two trusty canes. In both the artistic and personal areas, Elizabeth and I are talking around, about, the same person. To say there’s ‘meta’ in the air would be autofiction understatement.
Elizabeth McCracken, the author of the National Book Award finalist, The Giant’s House, is also the author, among other works, of Thunderstruck & Other Stories (winner of the 2014 Story Prize and long-listed for the National Book Award), Bowlaway, and The Souvenir Museum. She has served on the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently holds the James Michener Chair for Fiction at the University of Texas, Austin, where she lives with her husband, the writer and illustrator Edward Carey, and their two children.
We spoke recently via Zoom about the hero of The Hero of This Story, someone who certainly was a hero to both of us. Should you read Elizabeth’s wonderful novel, Natalie, the main character—and quite the character she was—will become a hero to you, too.
It is possible that Natalie as my former editor, if she were here, would ask me to delete that last sentence. Too sentimental, she might write in the margin.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Ryan Asmussen
The book is a novel, but not quite, and yet it is because you say it is. Do I have this right?
Elizabeth McCracken
It was a novel when I wrote it. The whole book is trying to hedge its bets on nearly every page about what kind of book it is, but, yes, it is a novel. It’s a little hard for me to put my finger on exactly why that is other than, to some extent, it was when I wrote it, and because I couldn’t have written it as a memoir. I probably wouldn’t have even started it as a memoir. I wanted to be able to leave out the stuff that probably would have to go into one. Nothing like deep, dark secrets or anything, but I would have had to have written much more about myself, and I really wasn’t interested in that. I also wanted to make up some stuff. But there’s just no way, no way I could have made this person up.
Ryan Asmussen
I know very well that I’ll never meet an individual more interesting, more of a piece, than your mother, your main character. Where did her incredible self-assurance come from? It was strongly present but never overbearing. Rather like the reed in Eastern literature: how its power comes from a suppleness connected to fast-rootedness, bending but never breaking.
Elizabeth McCracken
There were a lot of things that contributed to her distinctive personality. Part of it was having been told all her life that she couldn’t or shouldn’t do certain things. Also, having some relatives—my grandmother, but also a cousin of hers who was a dance teacher who taught my mother how to do a lot of things physically—surrounding her who thought that she should be able to do whatever she wanted. This, against an outer circle of people going, “Yeah, I don’t think you should, you know? It’s easier if you don’t walk here,” underestimating her.
I think she had been tremendously underestimated all her life. Being a twin in some ways contributed to that. Many of the twins I know were the only children in their family and their parents sort of divvied up personal characteristics to some extent. “Oh, you’re the musical one! You’re the confident one!” That probably had something to do with it. One of the reasons she was so interesting was because she was, in fact, very interested in herself while at the same time being very interested in the world. She really loved doing things and seeing things, and sitting and talking with people.
Ryan Asmussen
What did she give you in terms of your own personality? What was transmitted to you through nature/nurture, what was adopted by you consciously?
Elizabeth McCracken
What I think about most often was a piece of advice that her father, Harry Jacobson, gave her: Never do anything for the principle of the thing. Meaning, in a work situation, don’t teach somebody a lesson that they’re not going to learn, instead make the decision based on actual outcomes. Don’t dig in your heels and think somebody should be punished or made to feel bad. I think about that constantly.
Two inheritances from her which I’m incredibly grateful for, and they might be in the book, are, one, I have a very bad memory for unhappiness, which my mother also had. I don’t think she taught me this, I don’t know how I inherited it, but sometimes my husband will say, “Don’t you remember? You hated that person because of this or that thing that they did,” and I’m like, “Oh, yeah, that was bad. I should get mad at that again!” And, two, also like my mother, it’s quite hard to hurt my feelings by accident. I don’t take things personally that are not meant personally, that are simply because of somebody’s inattention or self-involvement. I think that’s something my mother taught me by example. I saw her out in the world, and people would say all sorts of things about her physical disabilities, and if you took them personally you would never stop yelling at them.
On the other hand, I’m definitely more of a worrier than my mother. I ring my hands over all kinds of terrible things that might happen, and my mother just didn’t. She was so unbelievably optimistic, sometimes infuriatingly so. She once said to me about a relative of ours, “Oh, did you know that Uncle Joe isn’t an alcoholic anymore?” When I replied, “What?” she said, “Yeah, he quit drinking. He went through the DTs, and now he’s perfectly fine.” I said, “You know how much you have to drink to go through the DTs?” and she said, “Yes, but he stopped.” She was passing this on as a bit of good news.
Ryan Asmussen
How much did the relationship she had with her body contribute to who she was? It was remarkable to see her transcend it.
Elizabeth McCracken
Absolutely, it must have, yes, but I don’t think she transcended her body. In fact, it was part of the fact that she had to figure out how to do things, part of the fact that she needed a strong will in order to do things, in general, but specifically to do things people thought she shouldn’t do. It was a huge part of her personality. I think we’re all defined by our bodies in ways that aren’t always so visible. It’s a luxury of somebody who gets around easily to think, “Well, you know, I really don’t consider my body.” I feel pretty strongly that her body wasn’t something for her to transcend. I think she would have said it was part of the whole megillah.
Ryan Asmussen
I can hear her saying exactly that.
Elizabeth McCracken
(laughs)
Ryan Asmussen
You write about how stellar she was as a boss. Indeed she was. How difficult was it for you to see her with that kind of objectivity during the writing? Because you do often take that angle in the book, in addition to the more expected subjective point-of-view.
Elizabeth McCracken
I will say one of the reasons I wrote it as a novel and not as a memoir is that, if I wrote it as a memoir, I would have interviewed a bunch of people. I would have written to you and said, “Hey, let’s talk about my mother!” I wouldn’t argue that objectivity is essential for a memoir, but it’s really not essential for a novel, as well as being impossible. I would have wanted more information than just what I knew.
I knew it when I was growing up, I could tell she took being a boss very seriously. The thing that she talked about at home most often was the human side of being a boss. She talked about anybody who worked for her as an individual human being. She never used the phrase “my staff,” and she had a considerable staff at Boston University. God, she put so much time into buying presents for people, wanting to get them something just right! She was a total extrovert. She really liked people as a quality, but she also really liked individual human beings. A lot of people err on one side or the other—I don’t always like people, but I do like individual human beings—and I know a lot of people who are extroverts who like a lot of people, but they’re very bad at one-on-one stuff.
Ryan Asmussen
Your book ranks so highly, I would say—
Elizabeth McCracken
This is so funny. I’m sorry. I just know I won’t give another interview in which I talk so directly about my mother. Probably in all the other interviews I’ll be like, “Well, the mother in the book…” and “The narrator talks about…” It’s just so different with you. I don’t yet have a handle on how to talk about the book to somebody who didn’t know my mother, you know? I’m not sure there can ever be a one-to-one correspondence of human being to-character in a novel, but in no case would I be disingenuous and say that she’s based on my mother because it has her actual name in the book.
Ryan Asmussen
No, of course not. No, what I was about to ask was, how did you approach your style choices? In terms of thinking about its complexity, its mystery explored of one daughter’s relationship with her mother, your book is just so subtle and skillful. How did you think about your language?
Elizabeth McCracken
I’m obsessed with language. I want to do stuff with it, and I think making the decision that it was a novel made that easier. I could just rely on the sentences to get me into the book. You know, I really didn’t want to write a novel about a writer, but then I did. It happens to all of us, eventually.
Ryan Asmussen
The frame story is your solo trip to London ten months after your mother’s death. How did that arrive? You write that it struck you during your time there that your visits to the city seemed to correspond to deaths in your family.
Elizabeth McCracken
That was there from the start, probably because I was in London when I started writing the book, even though not all of the events that are on that timeline are actual. The idea of trying to get an entire life into what is quite a small novel is daunting, so the walk around the city, around the Tate, seemed like a very helpful organizing principle. I made that decision early on that the narrator would be walking around London, thinking about her mother, and also that there would be almost no childhood in the book. The relationship between the mother and daughter would be an adult one.
Ryan Asmussen
The million dollar question: What would Natalie think about the book?
Elizabeth McCracken
What do you think?
Ryan Asmussen
She would certainly be proud of you. She would certainly recognize the excellence of the writing. I think she might have a few quibbles, here and there, but I imagine she would treasure it.
Elizabeth McCracken
My conclusion is that she would be very in favor of it. She would hate the stuff about the messiness of the house, that would be an objection. When she was alive, I tweeted about her a lot. I only tweeted when we were together, and so she would say something that I would think was funny, and I would ask if I could tweet that. She really liked doing it, and she would ask me about people’s responses, sometimes make jokes or respond to things I’d said about her. She enjoyed that kind of public notice.
Ryan Asmussen
I’m thinking about her as the “self-proclaimed inventor of the Mojito.”
Elizabeth McCracken
(laughs) My mother really loved that running joke. Whenever I tweeted about her, I would introduce her with that supposed fact. As you know, my mother loved being the center of attention, in a good way, not in a dark way. When I started the book, I thought she would probably hate it. She often complained about memoirs about parents. But, my conclusion as I wrote it was that actually she would see it as an act of love, without being utter hagiography. It’s interesting you said she’d be proud of me. My mother, whom I loved very much, did not ever convey pride. This was a sort of parenting gambit, and I feel like I’ve inherited this from her: once you’re proud of somebody, you’re claiming ownership over them, in a way. I think she would really like the book, though she might fondly call me a little brat. She also would also want to correct me on what I had gotten wrong, point by point.
Ryan Asmussen
Yes, yes. The opinionated editor-in-chief.
Elizabeth McCracken
She liked having opinions more than anybody I’ve ever met. She cherished them, almost polished them like jewels. Never in an obnoxious way, in a pushy or dominant way. She just had these opinions, and that was that.
Ryan Asmussen
I’ll go out on a limb and say at least one of the secrets to happiness, which Natalie had, was a joy in material things. She was a great collector of objects. Like the title of that great Richard Wilbur poem, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.” That was so very much her.
Elizabeth McCracken
That’s absolutely true. One of the great benefits of her later years is the scooter she got, which allowed her to go so many more places. She would just zoom through museums, sometimes it was a little difficult to keep up with her. I can see her pitching ahead of us down a street in the West Village. When we traveled, if I could, I always rented convertibles because she loved convertibles. She loved the freedom and the wind in her hair.
FICTION
The Hero of This Book
by Elizabeth McCracken
Ecco
Published October 4th, 2022
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