An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

"This is an intimate book....It is also a wildly important book." 

—Los Angeles Times

"A beautifully written book....It is, on the one hand, an incisive look at grief and the terrible weight of memory. But it's also a love story-a paean to McCracken's husband and both of their children."—Boston Globe

"The best memoirs transcend their particulars, offer a fresh look at the bumpy terrain of sorrow, love, youthful folly, aged folly, resilience, and selfhood. McCracken's is one of those."—Washington Post

"... Elizabeth McCracken does not howl out her loss. She is devastatingly calm and in this matches measure for measure her own fine writing. By the end of this memoir you will have held a beautiful child in your hands and you will have acknowledged him. This book is an extraordinary gift to us all."—Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon

"A fascinating, word-perfect and bittersweet memoir."—Elinor Lipman, Miami Herald

"What an extraordinary book - joy and sorrow all mixed together on every page. Elizabeth McCracken is amazing."—Mameve Medwed, author of Of Men and Their Mothers

"... McCracken writes with such clarity and immediacy ...a writer who rises to the human complexity of grief with all her powers, and all her heart."—Mark Doty, author of Dog Years

"Reading it is a mysteriously enlarging experience. It could pair neatly with Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking: it's hard to imagine two more rigorous, unsentimental guides to enduring the very bottom of the scale of human emotion."—Lev Grossman, Time

"Stunning...it is a triumph of her will and her writing that she has turned her tragedy into a literary gift."—PW (Starred Review)