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Podcast: The Shakespeare and Company Interview
Episode: On Parents, Grief and the difference between Fiction and Memoir, with Elizabeth McCracken
Description: Elizabeth McCracken’s new novel The Hero of this Book is the profound and poignant account of one writer’s attempt to convey something of the irrepressible, indomitable, indefatigable, almost indescribable character of her recently deceased mother on the page. Although the narrator repeatedly stresses that this is a novel, and not a memoir, that’s to say neither a memoir by McCracken nor a memoir by the narrator…although what exactly the difference is between each of the two forms, and how each lends itself to the task at hand, is also an important interrogation of this extraordinary and tend...