There aren't many first novels as memorable as Elizabeth McCracken's "The Giant's House." Her 1996 debut is one of the oddest and most moving love stories in recent fiction — the platonic romance of Peggy Cort, an introverted librarian, and James Carlton Sweatt, only a kid when he wanders in the library and a true giant, at 8 feet 7 inches, when he dies at 20.

By the way, disclosing Sweatt's death won't ruin "The Giant's House" for anyone. McCracken does so herself on the third page. The poignancy of her novel lies elsewhere.

The same can be said of the death in her new book, a memoir with a great title, "An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination." This time it arrives on the sixth page and it isn't fictional. In McCracken's words: "A child dies in this book: a baby. A baby is stillborn. You don't have to tell me how sad that is: it happened to me and my husband, our baby, our son."

This is a terrible subject for anyone to confront. And no one would blame a memoirist writing about her stillborn infant for indulging in self-pity and maudlin sentiments. But McCracken doesn't do either. She remains true to what novelist Katherine Dunn wrote of her a decade ago: "McCracken is a true romantic, not the sloppy, gushy kind."

McCracken tells this story with the same gift for precise, poetic phrasing and for telling details she displayed in "The Giant's House" and her underpraised 2001 novel "Niagara Falls All Over Again." In the opening pages of "An Exact Replica," she comes up with sentences that anticipate the story: "This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending."

One dimension of that happiness is her marriage to writer-illustrator Edward Carey; another, of course, is her pregnancy.

"I was 35 and had never had a really serious romance," she discloses — and never expected to. It turns out that the Peggy Cort of "The Giant's House" wasn't invented whole cloth: McCracken had been a librarian herself and liked living alone and doing things solo. But then a certain "cheerful, 30ish Englishman" had shown up at a New York party given by Barnes & Noble.

"An Exact Replica" is their love story as much as her (and their) tale of loss. During their first four years together, beginning in 2002, they divided their time between Iowa City, where they taught at the esteemed Iowa Writer's Workshop, and European cities and towns, where they would take up temporary residence while not teaching. Clearly, it was a life they enjoyed, conducive to writing. But it also says something essential about McCracken; she doesn't portray this arrangement as idyllic. There's a finely tuned tension between romanticism and realism in her personality and prose.

"People told me, 'I'd love to have your life,' and I would always say 'But then you'd have to accept my standard of living.' We didn't own a house, a car, not even a sofa. We spent our money on souvenir busts and cheap red wine.' "

The wine stopped when she discovered she was pregnant. Two months into it, they moved from Paris to the countryside, in the Aquitaine region, to a rambling house an hour's drive from Bordeaux — "a part of the world I will never, ever, ever go back to," she writes.

McCracken narrates the stillbirth with remarkable restraint, even though sorrow vibrates constantly just below the surface of her worlds. But it is her self-analysis that cuts to the quick.

While resolving to have a second child, she acknowledges that the potential new baby will never erase the pain of losing the first: "He was a person. I missed him like a person."

In a longer passage, she helps us understand what she meant when she wrote this would be the happiest story with the saddest ending.

"After the baby died, I told Edward over and over again that I didn't want to forget any of it: the happiness was real, as real as the baby itself, and it would be terrible, unforgivable, to forget it. His entire life had turned out to be the 41 weeks and one day of his gestation, and those days were happy. We couldn't pretend they weren't ... I would have done the whole thing over again even knowing how it would end."

And the baby had a name, a nickname really: Pudding. But a name was required on a death certificate and so Pudding officially became Pudding.

All of her second pregnancy is "tinged with sadness." But after Gus is born, she decides, "my love for him is just plain love, just plain sweet."

As for the book's title, where she finds it and how it surfaces in the story is something no reviewer should disclose. Suffice to say that the way McCracken uses the phrase will break your heart and mend it too. In a decade glutted with memoirs, McCracken's makes you realize just how good a genre this can be.

"An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir" by Elizabeth McCracken; Little, Brown and Company, 192 pages, $19.99

To find out more about Richard L. Pincus and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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