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An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination
- A Memoir
- Narrated by: Elizabeth McCracken
- Length: 3 hrs and 47 mins
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Publisher's summary
This audiobook is about what happened next. In her ninth month of pregnancy, she learned that her baby boy had died. How do you deal with and recover from this kind of loss? Of course you don't - but you go on. And if you have ever experienced loss or love someone who has, you will hope to go on with the help and company of this remarkable audiobook.
With humor and heart and unfailing generosity, McCracken considers the nature of love, and grief. She opens her heart and leaves all of ours the richer for it.
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Loved it!
- By Denise Wallace on 06-26-09
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Finding Grace
- A True Story about Losing Your Way in Life...and Finding It Again
- By: Donna VanLiere
- Narrated by: Donna VanLiere
- Length: 4 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Finding Grace is the powerful, often humorous, and deeply moving story of one woman's journey of broken dreams. It is the story of how a painful legacy of the past is confronted and met with peace. This book is for anyone who has struggled to understand why our desires---even the simplest ones---are sometimes denied or who has questioned where God is when we need Him most. This story is about one woman's unlikely road to motherhood. Finally, it's a book about the "undeserved gift which is life itself."
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Finding Grace... and joy, delight, and camaraderie
- By WeRLoved on 02-02-17
By: Donna VanLiere
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If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother
- By: Julia Sweeney
- Narrated by: Julia Sweeney
- Length: 6 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Since her time on Saturday Night Live, where she created the infamous androgynous character "Pat", Julia Sweeney has gone on to establish herself as a witty, captivating performer of one-woman shows, like God Said Ha!, In the Family Way, and Letting Go of God. She gave a TED talk sharing how she explained the birds and the bees to her eight-year-old daughter, Mulan, which ignited an incredible response. Now, when it comes to talking about motherhood, people want to hear what Julia has to say.
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I Love Julia Sweeney
- By Lisa on 04-05-13
By: Julia Sweeney
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The Other Mother
- A Novel
- By: Carol Goodman
- Narrated by: Nicol Zanzarella
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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When Daphne Marist and her infant daughter, Chloe, pull up the gravel drive to the home of Daphne's new employer, it feels like they've entered a whole new world. Tucked in the Catskills, the stone mansion looks like something out of a fairy tale, its lush landscaping hiding the view of the mental asylum just beyond its border. Daphne secured the live-in position using an assumed name and fake credentials, telling no one that she's on the run from a controlling husband who has threatened to take her daughter away.
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Hard to follow
- By cindy on 04-11-18
By: Carol Goodman
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My Real Children
- By: Jo Walton
- Narrated by: Alison Larkin
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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It's 2015, and Patricia Cowan is very old. "Confused today," read the notes clipped to the end of her bed. She forgets things she should know - what year it is, major events in the lives of her children. But she remembers things that don't seem possible. She remembers marrying Mark and having four children. And she remembers not marrying Mark and raising three children with Bee instead.
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A strange take on an otherwise simple story.
- By Lauren on 01-08-15
By: Jo Walton
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Bettyville
- By: George Hodgman
- Narrated by: Jeff Woodman
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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When George Hodgman leaves Manhattan for his hometown of Paris, Missouri, he finds himself - an unlikely caretaker and near-lethal cook - in a head-on collision with his aging mother, Betty, a woman of wit and will. Will George lure her into assisted living? When hell freezes over. He can't bring himself to force her from the home both treasure - the place where his father's voice lingers, the scene of shared jokes, skirmishes, and, behind the dusty antiques, a rarely acknowledged conflict...
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Title Should Be Georgeville-It's All About George
- By Sara on 10-08-15
By: George Hodgman
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In the Country
- Stories
- By: Mia Alvar
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu, Don Castro
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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These nine globe-trotting, unforgettable stories from Mia Alvar, a remarkable new literary talent, vividly give voice to the women and men of the Filipino diaspora. Here are exiles, emigrants, and wanderers uprooting their families from the Philippines to begin new lives in the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere - and sometimes turning back again.
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My introduction to Filipino literature and culture
- By Amazon Customer on 03-28-16
By: Mia Alvar
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Hello from the Gillespies
- By: Monica McInerney
- Narrated by: Ulli Birvé
- Length: 16 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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For the past 33 years, Angela Gillespie has sent to friends and family around the world an end-of-the-year letter titled ‘Hello from the Gillespies’. It’s always been cheery and full of good news. This year, Angela surprises herself - she tells the truth....
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Engaging
- By mgn on 08-18-15
By: Monica McInerney
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Charms for the Easy Life
- By: Kaye Gibbons
- Narrated by: Kate Fleming
- Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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A family without men, the Birches live gloriously offbeat lives in the lush, green backwoods of North Carolina. Radiant, headstrong Sophia and her shy, brilliant daughter, Margaret, possess powerful charms to ward off loneliness, despair, and the human misery that often beats a path to their door. And they are protected by the eccentric wisdom and muscular love of the remarkable matriarch Charlie Kate, a solid, uncompromising, self-taught healer who treats everything from boils to broken bones to broken hearts.
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So Lovely!
- By Doodle slave on 01-04-17
By: Kaye Gibbons
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Modern Loss
- Candid Conversation About Grief. Beginners Welcome.
- By: Rebecca Soffer, Gabrielle Birkner
- Narrated by: Meredith Mitchell, Josh Bloomberg
- Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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At a time when we mourn public figures and national tragedies with hashtags, where intimate posts about loss go viral and we receive automated birthday reminders for dead friends, it's clear we are navigating new terrain without a road map. Let's face it: Most of us have always had a difficult time talking about death and sharing our grief. We're awkward and uncertain; we avoid, ignore, or even deny feelings of sadness; we offer platitudes; we send sympathy bouquets whittled out of fruit.
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Not What I Was Expecting
- By Bessie Mae on 03-01-23
By: Rebecca Soffer, and others
What listeners say about An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Meghan Gallas
- 04-28-09
Great Book!
As a labor and delivery nurse that helps women through these losses, I loved this book for the different perspective it gave me. She is a great author and kept me listening the whole way through!
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- Carin
- 11-17-11
Tragic and heartbreaking but important.
Novelist Elizabeth McCracken's first son was stillborn. She does tell you right off the bat that she does successfully have a second child, but of course he will never replace her first child. This book is visceral, not just heart-wrenching but like going into your chest with a dull knife, ripping out your heart, jumping up and down on it for a bit, and then pouring salt on it. Rarely has anyone so eloquent written about something so tremendously sad. From my point of view as a bystander to a similar situation, this rang extraordinarily true.
I was initially impressed that the author was narrating this audiobook herself. I had previously listened to The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, and she had a different narrator (although a brilliant one). I thought it could be too hard on her. Unlike Magical, where the narrator's voice occasionally trembled with so much emotion, in Replica, Ms. McCracken keeps a firm grip on her emotions, even as she reads about the most horrible days of her life. At first I felt it wasn't as personal, but in the end, it actually made the narration even more personal. You could feel her biting back her emotions and her ironclad steadiness broke my heart even more, as I could still feel her pain through her stoicism. Sometimes watching (hearing) a person maintain a stiff upper lip through tragedy can be the most heartbreaking thing of all.
I teared up a couple of times while listening to this book, and I am not a person who cries easily. I'd like to thank Ms. McCracken for allowing us to hear her story and share in her sorrow. And I once again am very thankful, as The Mighty Mighty Bosstones say, "Have you ever been close to tragedy or close to folks who have... I never had to knock on wood, but I know someone who has, which makes me wonder if I could, it makes me wonder if I ever had to knock on wood, and I'm glad I haven't yet, because I'm sure it isn't good, that's the impression that I get." That song was running through my mind when the audiobook was over
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Pamela Harvey
- 09-18-08
Sad but Hopeful
I like the idea of a memoir based on a specific event or period of time in one's life.
This memoir deals with a sensitive and emotional subject but just when I thought I could not absorb any more sadness the author pulls together the broken threads of her life into a new fabric of acceptance and redemption.
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Timothy
- 03-21-11
Exact Replica review
McCracken elaborates her angst and disbelief concerning the stillborn loss of her child and her reconciling how emotionally attached she was to the fetus during development and the disengagement she had to endure to separate herself from the dead child. I thought she took a brave road in allowing insight into her emotional state during this transition. Whereas this is not a re-read for me, I thought it was insightful and meaningful for the emotional states we need to endure during such passages. I would recommend it.
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- Shirley Shani Ben Zvi
- 12-07-18
Amazing
10 years ago, my son was stillborn on week 28. It's an experience I wish on no one, and most people cannot begin to imagine, let alone understand. Elizabeth McCracken, with her direct authenticity, resonated almost every fiber of my experience as well, though hers was so different than mine. I found myself nodding, crying, citing her, saying "word" while alone in the car. I found myself wanting to go back in time and give this book to every person who ever misunderstood my experience, but more over - to 35 years old me.
I recommend this book to every person who ever knew someone who had a stillbirth. To every person who ever knew someone who grieved. As a grief therapist, I recommend this book to each and every one of my colleagues.
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- Sara
- 01-29-14
Grief and loss explored and shared.
Any additional comments?
This powerful book delves deeply into the very personal experience of hope and excitement of pregnancy and then the subsequent loss of that hope. The story will speak directly to anyone who has lost a child. The author's experience is so true and heartrendingly told that it takes on a universal quality. It will ring true and put words to the tragedy many people experience. Beautifully written.
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28 people found this helpful
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- Paul A Rothman
- 11-30-16
So Relatable if you had a loss
I would recommend this book to any women who had a stillborn baby. It is validating and comforting and has put words on so many things I have experienced when I found out my baby had died in the womb.
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- Anthony
- 09-13-21
A beautiful true story
As a retired Obstetrician I can empathize with this book. Also because my wife and I lost a pregnancy, this book has so many poignant and beautiful observations.
This book is a wonderful read.
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