That’s why he took in the boarders.” The chaos, as they see it, is an act of grace, a gift to their future selves. ‘I don’t own any, okay? The family tree…begins with me.’” His children, who are narrating the story, do not interpret their father’s reticence as a sad or shameful secret: “He wanted his children to have better.

“‘Look,’ said Dad, madder than I’d ever seen him before. At one point, a boarder asks the host for a story from his family’s past, and he demures. There’s a loose arrangement to have housework done in exchange for room and board, but mostly the father just likes having people around to talk with. The second story in Here’s Your Hat, my favorite in the collection, called “Some Have Entertained Angels, Unaware,” is about a widower and father of two daughters who has begun to invite drifters into his home.

Take, for instance, the opening line of her new novel Bowlaway: “They found a body in the Salford Cemetery, but aboveground and alive.” Or, take the first line of “It’s Bad Luck To Die,” the first story in her debut collection Here’s Your Hat, What’s Your Hurry: “Maybe you wonder how a Jewish girl from Des Moines got Jesus Christ tattooed on her three times.” That book, originally published in 1993, is being reissued by Ecco Books this week alongside Bowlaway, so readers have an opportunity to skip backward and forward in time, reading McCracken’s past work alongside her latest, a sensation similar to what reading McCracken is always like: the past and the future mysteriously entangled, old endings flowing seamlessly into new beginnings. Bradley Babendir | Longreads | Februrary 2019 | 8 minutes (2,181 words)Įlizabeth McCracken is great at beginnings.

Bowlaway elizabeth mccracken