a good book. no - a great book (if you're ready for it)

[i don't like watching movies knowing they're going to make me cry. same with sad songs. i don't really understand when people say that they "just needed a good cry". i don't know if recommending this book to others will affect them in the same way it has me, but i can surely hope so. i hope that if you think you will gain something from it, that you will read it. if you don't think you're ready, then you're probably not. i think it was my time and i think it's helped. not a lot has helped, so i thought i'd pass it on.]
i just finished reading "an exact replica of a figment of my imagination" by elizabeth mccracken. i didn't want to read this book. i thought it would be horribly painfully tortuous and that i would cry in that choking-off-your-own-air-supply kind of way. but to put it simply: it wasn't and i didn't. much like reading the wonderful words of others in this wonderful supportive blog-world - i felt strangely at piece reading her work. i think i was ready for it and i'm glad i did. honestly i read this book so fast it still feels really fresh (it's been rainy, chilly, stay-indoorsy-type weather here and i've read 3 novels in the past 2 days)
here's an example of some of what i loved about this book.

This excerpt of a passage about her doctors visits with her second pregnancy (her first was a stillbirth) struck me as exactly how i have been feeling since Lillian's death.
"I wanted a separate waiting room for people like me, with different magazines. No Parenting or Wondertime or Pregnancy, no ads with pink or tawny or pearly smiling infants... What I wanted, scrawled across my chart in shaky physician's cursive: NOTE: do not blow sunshine up patient's ass."

This one about time passing and wanting to have fond, happier memories:
"all she wanted was permission to remember her child with pleasure instead of grief. To remember that he was dead, but to remember him without pain: he's dead but of course she still loves him, and that love isn't morbid or bloodstained or unsightly, it doesn't need to be shoved away."

On meeting another woman who comforted her and confided that her first child was also stillborn:
"What came over me was gratitude and an entirely inappropriate love. I didn't know the woman, but I loved her."
I think that passage is especially important because it makes me reflect on how important it is for me to keep reaching out to others (even if that is only reading their blogs) because it does provide me comfort, even if I don't know the reason.

My favorite part is the ending:
"It's a happy life, but someone is missing. It's a happy life, and someone is missing."