Elizabeth McCracken
Elizabeth McCracken is an American novelist and writer who works in the English language.
Born in Brighton in 1966, McCracken attended Newton North High School before continuing her education at Drexel University. Alongside her career as a writer, she has also worked as a librarian — a professional life that has run in parallel with her literary one.
Over the course of her career, McCracken has received a range of honors. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Berlin Prize, as well as an O. Henry Award. She has also received the PEN New England Award, which stands among the recognitions that mark her work in the field.
McCracken writes in English, and the accumulation of awards across her career — spanning fellowships, prizes, and honors for fiction — reflects the sustained attention her writing has drawn from literary institutions in the United States.
Quotes by Elizabeth McCracken
Elizabeth McCracken's insights on:
I want a book that acknowledges that life goes on but that death goes on, too, that a person who is dead is a long, long story. You move on from it, but the death will never disappear from view. Your friends may say, Time heals all wounds. No, it doesn’t, but eventually you’ll feel better. You’ll be yourself again.
I’m so sorry,” he said, because after Pamela died, he promised himself that if anyone told him the smallest, saddest story, he would answer, I’m so sorry. Meaning, Yes, that happened. You couldn’t believe the people who believed that not mentioning sadness was a kind of magic that could stave off the very sadness you didn’t mention – as though grief were the opposite of Rumpelstiltskin and materialized only at the sound of its own name.
We have, all of us, invented things that others have beat us to: walking upright, a certain sort of sandwich involving avocado and an onion roll, a minty sweet cocktail, ourselves, romantic love, human life.
I didn’t know what it was I was feeling. Then I realized it was seeing someone and knowing immediately that you love him.
I got that familiar mania – there is information somewhere here, and I can find it, I have to. A good librarian is not so different from a prospector, her whole brain a divining rod. She walks to books and stands and wonders: here? Is the answer here? The same blind faith in finding, even when hopeless. If someone caught me when I was in the throes of tracking something elusive, I would have told them: but it’s out there. I can feel it.
This is why you need everyone you know after a disaster, because there is not one right response. It’s what paralyzes people around the grief-stricken, of course, the idea that there are right things to say and wrong things and it’s better to say nothing than something clumsy.
