Wingate winner Elizabeth McCracken: ‘My fear is being boring in the service of accuracy’

In the summer of 2019, ten months after her mother died, the American novelist Elizabeth McCracken spent a few months with her family in London, a city she had previously visited with her three years before. She was trying to write short stories but wrestling to get them into shape. A friend, also an author, mentioned that she was currently writing a work of autofiction — the currently popular genre that adheres as close as possible to the facts of its author’s life. It struck an unexpected chord with McCracken who, during her walks through Clerkenwell and along the Thames, had been thinking a lot about her mother, as a “way of keeping her close”. Perhaps, she thought, she could write about her mother instead.

Inspirational upbringing: the writer as a child with her parents[Missing Credit]

This month McCracken’s novel The Hero of this Book won the Wingate Prize, the annual award given to the best literary work, fiction or non-fiction, to “translate the idea of Jewishness to the general reader”. It’s a short, taut, restlessly shape-shifting novel in which an unnamed narrator, on holiday by herself in London, spends a Sunday walking, taking in landmarks from the London Eye to Tate Modern, the Bridge Theatre to St Paul’s Cathedral, a building “as startling as an elk in the road”, she writes. Not long previously her mother’s home in Iowa had been sold and the combination of the two events sparks a fury of memory and thought in the narrator, whose voice is witty, self-questioning and ruminative by turn as she recalls a woman who was fiercely unsentimental, sure-minded and full of life. One favourite observation: “She liked to quote her favourite New Yorker cartoon, a man on an analyst’s couch, saying, ‘I had a difficult childhood, especially lately.’”

At a swimming pool with her mum and brother in Des Moines[Missing Credit]

McCracken, a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop — the lodestar of creative-writing courses in America — is a National Book Awards finalist and the author of several acclaimed novels and short-story collections. She also teaches creative writing at the University of Texas in Austin, and perhaps as a consequence of that, The Hero of This Book is in constant conversation with itself over what sort of book it actually is. McCracken is firm that it is a novel — yet she acknowledges too that the central character, a tiny vital Jewish theatre-loving editor and academic from a “small railroad town” outside Des Moines, is 100 per cent her mother. Why not call it a memoir? “Partly because my mother hated memoirs about parents!” she says. “She worried about memoirs in which parents were blamed [although The Hero of This Book isn’t about blame at all]. She wasn’t interested in the modern memoir in which someone writes about their problems. She was a real pull-yourself- up-by-your-bootstraps kind of person. But also, she aesthetically really believed in novels.”

As does McCracken. In the book the narrator worries over how best to write about her mother, even while acknowledging that “she cannot be represented in any autobiographical or fictional or autofictional prose, not even this sentence I’m currently typing”. What emerges is a woman who is both fiercely defined and yet, like the best characters in literature, refuses to be pinned down. This is in keeping with McCracken’s own perception of her mother, who had cerebral palsy yet who as a child McCracken never understood to be disabled. “That’s just the sort of person she was,” she says. “I tried to fictionalise her but every time I did it made her less interesting. But I also wanted the freedom of the novel. My greatest fear as a writer is being boring in the service of accuracy. I’m quite suspicious of the idea that one’s personal experience is essential for fiction, which probably explains my dislike of autofiction as a genre.”