By Julia Hanna

My lunch with Elizabeth McCracken seems in danger of being thwarted by Harvard Square’s subterranean restaurants. Our first below-street-level destination is closed; I suggest another, forgetting that it, too, involves a steep and narrow descent. This wouldn’t be a problem if McCracken weren’t accompanied by her five-month-old daughter, Matilda, who travels by stroller. No matter. We negotiate the steps with some help, and Matilda sleeps through it all.

Strollers and other baby paraphernalia are relatively new to McCracken, who is also the mother of a two-year-old, Gus. As she writes in her recent memoir, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination (Little, Brown, 2008), “I was a spinster, a woman no one imagined marrying. That suited me. I would be the weird aunt, the oddball friend who bought the great presents and occasionally drank too much and fell asleep on the sofa. Actually, I already was that person.” Then McCracken met Edward Carey, a playwright and novelist. They were married in 2003 and for a while lived the peripatetic writer’s life, with stints in Ireland, England, Berlin, and Paris. By 2005, McCracken was expecting their first child. 

Exact Replica recounts the crushing loss of that child, who was stillborn, and the birth of Gus just over a year later. The book, which manages to be fearless, funny, and heartbreaking all at once, is also riveting in its honest assessment of  the tragedy. “I want a book that acknowledges that life goes on, but that death goes on, too,” she writes, “that a person who is dead is a long, long story.”   

The premise for her current project, “Let Your Heart Become Iron,” might seem like a stretch for any novelist except McCracken, who has written a love story about a small-town librarian and an 8-foot, 7-inch man (The Giant’s House: A Romance, Dial, 1996) and a decades-spanning chronicle of a vaudeville team (Niagara Falls All Over Again, Dial, 2001). In her new work, set in Massachusetts in the 1970s, a young woman named Christian Wrede trains as a weight-lifting prodigy under the guidance of her father, a dentist who is also named Christian Wrede.

“I suppose I’m always interested in physical extremes of one kind or another,” says McCracken. “I lifted weights pretty seriously a few years ago and found it rather like writing. It was solitary, effort-filled, pleasant work, and you could plainly see your progress, in pages or poundage, when it was going well.”

In addition to her novel, McCracken, who has accepted a position at the University of Texas at Austin, is nearing completion of a second short-story collection. “Learning about the other fellows’ work keeps you open and receptive,” she says of her year at Radcliffe. “It’s easy to go into lockdown and avoid taking in new information when you’re writing a book.”

She mentions being amazed by research that Thrishantha Nanayakkara RI ’09 has done on how a robot can “learn” to better detect land mines with the help of a mongoose. “The poet Gail Mazur RI ’09 told me that she had dibs on writing about it,” McCracken says with a laugh. Even so, one hopes that McCracken will have a go at it, too.

Read an excerpt from “Let Your Heart Become Iron” by Elizabeth McCracken RI '09.

Photo by Tony Rinaldo