The cover of Elizabeth McCracken's The Hero of This Book features the words "A Novel" set in smaller text within the "O" in the Hero. This identification has become something of a necessity in recent years as a plethora of volumes have been released which blur the previously stark boundaries separating fiction and autobiography. It is not sheer coincidence that this book shares certain similarities with Francisco Goldman's Monkey Boy, published the previous year. Both novels feature author protagonists easily confused with their creators within a narrative in which the relationship with the mother of these characters is the driving force behind the circumstances in which the reader comes to know them.
Where McCracken's book differs substantially is that protagonist is navigating through the grief of her mother's death. The passing of the character's mother mirrors the passing of the author's mother, however. Still, there are also significant differences. McCracken's protagonist is not just motherless, but also childless and unmarried, distinctly not the case with the author herself.
The hero of The Hero of This Book is the dead mother who is, of course, very strongly based on the author's real mother. As a result, she seems to be very much like the mother of the author and this novel seems to be very much like a memoir. But McCracken says that she promised her mother to never write a memoir of her life that focuses on her mother while her protagonist writes, in an interior monologue with herself:
"Perhaps you fear writing a memoir, reasonably. Invent a single man and call your book a novel. The freedom one fictional man grants you is immeasurable" and, just a little later, "I am not a memoirist."
And so, The Hero of This Book becomes another addition to the curious little literary movement of the 2010s and early 2020s that seeks to reinvent the very concept of the memoir. Monkey Boy moves back and forth in time as its creator, Francisco Goldman, basically recreates major events of his own history and runs his fictional doppelganger, Francisco Goldberg, through them in an attempt to figure out the link between his early experiences and his adult disappointments. Then there is Margo Jefferson's Constructing a Nervous System which explicitly identifies itself as a memoir on the cover, but at times feels more like an experimental novel.
McCracken's novel is also like Jefferson's memoir in that there is no actual plot. The novel is basically the story of McCracken's fictionalized version of herself visiting London during "the summer before the world stopped." So, in addition to almost being a memoir, it also almost belongs in the new genre of Covid-novel. One could even argue it absolutely is a Covid-novel because by portraying what the world like just before the pandemic hit, it also becomes a story about how normality seemed to change overnight.
Which may be the whole point of the book. The protagonist's visit to England is done within the context of her grief over her mother's recent passing. The 2019 world of pre-Covid normality was not normality for anyone who was mourning the death of a loved one. The pandemic would bring the story of McCracken's real-life experience with the loss of normality home to untold millions who would not have experienced otherwise.
