A London Travelouge That Shows the Road Back from Grief and Loss
A writer travels to London to mourn/discover/bury her mother, dead now for 10 months. The author claims, with great frequency, that it’s not a memoir, no matter how much it seems like one. The lady doth protesteth…
The unnamed narrator is a modified version of the actual author, McCracken tells us in a fourth wall breaking aside to the reader. I read the book cold, with no previous knowledge of the author’s work or life, and was willing to believe her, but really hoping that this secondary narrator, the actual author popping up from time to time, was an unreliable narrator…and that she’d made it all up whole cloth because if she had, it’s pretty amazing worldbuilding. You’re on your own for finding the answer to that.
The protagonist, who may or may not be the hero of the book, if indeed such a thing even exists, is a writer in her late 50s whose mother has died almost a year before and has been taking care of all the details involved. What she isn’t is ready to close the lid on her mother’s life, and she’s gone to London, where they went together three years earlier, and wanders around the town, rabbit holes of recollection looming like open manhole covers on the streets they’d trod together.
It’s not a memoir, she asserts. No, it’s an exercise in self-indulgence and grieving. I say that like it’s a bad thing, but it’s not. The fictional author is out there processing grief in a melancholy travelogue of a city they shared as she looks for the mother of her memory in museums and theaters, both of which her mother had loved until at last she can accept that its time to open the collection of photos the realtor has sent her, showing a house far too neat, far too empty, and accept that her mother is gone.
Anyone who’s dealt with the decline of an aging relative will find this resonant, and as to whether it’s fact or fiction, as an instructor in a writing class tells the protagonist in the book, said, “If I know one thing, it’s that it doesn’t make any difference. Call it what you want.”