Leave it to Elizabeth McCracken to refresh the genre of the parental tribute.
This book is not a memoir — or at least not a straightforward memoir — because McCracken promised her fiercely private mother, who hated memoirs and especially memoirs about dead parents, that she would never write about her. In fact, the book's frontispiece reproduces the inscription McCracken purportedly wrote to her mother on her very first book, Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry: "For Mom — whose life history I will continue to mine, but will never — no matter what she or anybody else thinks — appear as a character in my work, being too good for the likes of me and my characters." It is dated Mother's Day, 1993.
