Elizabeth McCracken

Elizabeth McCracken is the author of eight books, including Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry, The Giant’s House, Niagara Falls All Over Again, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, Thunderstruck & Other Stories, Bowlaway, The Souvenir Museum, and her latest, The Hero of This Book which was published by Jonathan Cape in January 2023.

Elizabeth has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Liguria Study Center, the American Academy in Berlin, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Thunderstruck & Other Stories won the 2015 Story Prize.

Her work has been published in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The O. Henry Prize, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. You can find The Hero of This Book and Elizabeth's other titles on our catalogue.

Who were your heroes as you were growing up?

I don't think I much went in for heroes as a kid. I certainly looked up to my brother, Harry. & I loved all black-and-white movie comedians. Wait: as an older teenager, 15-18, I absolutely loved Oscar Wilde, memorized swaths of his work, and wore his picture in a locket around my neck. (I still have the locket somewhere).

I read somewhere that you were a librarian. What was your experience like as a librarian?

I was a public librarian, the head of circulation at an urban library. Before that I worked in a public library from 15-22, first as a teenage page (as we were called) shelving books, and then behind the circulation desk. I love public libraries and I miss them, my patrons, my colleagues, the entire public who came in to read or listen or use the computers or even take a nap.

One of my favourite characters in your books is Bertha Truitt in Bowlaway. How was that book to write and the creation of Bertha in particular?

She's a favorite of mine, too, even though in some ways she's the character I know the least. The first thing I knew about Bowlaway--I have never written a book like this before & won't again, but it was fun--were the characters' names. I took them from my grandfather' genealogies, and the start of Bertha Truitt was what I imagined an abstract Bertha Truitt to be. The more I wrote, the more mysterious she became, which is rare for me and my characters, and so I decided to lean into it: she was a mystery to herself, but also full of self-confidence. It's a pleasure to write about characters who feel in no way constrained by convention. So she invented a sport--candlepin bowling, which actually exists--and loved it so much she decided to devote her life to it.

The Hero of This Book is a very personal story. Can you tell us a little about it?

I'm married to an Englishperson (Edward Carey, also a novelist) and we're in England a lot. In the summer of 2019, we were in London for a month. We'd just been to my mother's memorial service. I was trying to write and failing, and walking around London, and thinking about my mother, who was an extraordinary, wonderful, maddening person. & so I began to write about her.

Writers often say that the most interesting part of writing about anything with a factual background is the space between fact and fiction that you have to invent. Was that a problem as it was such a personal story?

Weirdly, it happened pretty seamlessly! I made up minor characters. I will say that the narrator isn't really me. But the mother in The Hero of this Book is really my mother.

What's next for you?

I'm working on some short stories. & I'm toying with the idea of a novel about an artist who makes work about the funiculars of England (having visited funiculars in Hastings--which has two!--and Scarborough this summer).

One book, piece of music or work of art that everyone should experience?

I don't think there's any such thing as a universal piece of art. That said, you can't go wrong with Laurel & Hardy's Way Out West.

What is on your 'to read' pile at the moment?

Szilvia Molnar's The Nursery.

What is the best piece of life advice you were ever given?

The advice my mother gave to me, which was her father's advice, was, "Never do anything for the principle of the thing." Meaning, behave ethically, but make every decision for the human beings involved, not because you want to teach somebody a lesson. Also Ann Patchett gave me her father's advice, which is, "Do not engage with people with whom you do not wish to be engaged".

Can you tell us one thing about yourself that your readers may not know?

Now that I've confessed to the Oscar Wilde locket, it's all out there.