She Appreciates All the Attention--Really

Elizabeth McCracken is very sensible. When she first put together $200, she bought an ergonomically correct desk chair. In selecting her first tattoo--she now has three--McCracken’s practicality persisted.

“I chose Toulouse-Lautrec’s artist stamp. It’s on my right ankle,” McCracken says, pouring a nip of whiskey into her coffee. “Now on bad days I can pretend I’m one of those women in a Toulouse painting, in disarray.”

Today, it just so happens, McCracken is looking quasi-put-together. Her lipstick is outlined; her necklace, vintage ‘40s; yet her clothes are sprawling in oversized layers. The past few months have been big for the Boston-based writer: She’s been named on Granta magazine’s much-talked-about Top 20 American Writers Under 40 list; she’s published her first novel, “The Giant’s House,” to critical success.

What reviewers keep praising is her tone, practical and idiosyncratic at the same time. You could see it in “Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry” (Turtle Bay, 1994)--McCracken’s first book, a collection of short stories--though it went largely unrecognized until “The Giant’s House” (Dial Press, 1996)--the tale of Peggy Cort, a Cape Cod librarian, and James Sweatt, the teenage giant with whom she falls in love.

Now, sitting at the Field, a Cambridge bar, McCracken, newly thrifty, strains for calm and semi-jokes about the perils of success.

“I try to appreciate the attention and ignore it as much as possible,” she says, taking small sips of spiked brew. “I’m happy but it’s a low level of pride. I feel very much like these things are happening to a relative that I’m fond of but who lives in a different city.”

*

Over the course of the afternoon, McCracken holds forth on feng shui (after years of obsessive office-furniture rearranging she’s found her ideal configuration: a window abutting the side of her desk, on the right); writers colonies (great, unless you have an affair); and fun things to do with 100-plus copies of your remaindered book (McCracken plans to build coffee tables out of “Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry”).

Also, with prodding, she spills the daily details of her life.

“Basically, my entire existence is a matter of trying to balance all the things I’m trying to avoid with all the other things I’m trying to avoid, so that I can actually get some things done,” she offers. To do this, she has, more or less, a four-part regime:

Morning (get up around 10, read mail, walk, think about lifting weights).

Work Session I (forage through the kitchen for crackers, putz, obsessively check e-mail, do some book-related reading, eat more crackers, attempt to revise, fiddle with apple butter stains on chair).

Break (try to leave the house).

Work Session II (put feet up on desk, set keyboard in lap, and write intensely until 2 or 3 a.m.).

“I do my best to avoid describing my days because they’re so immensely pathetic,” she says. “You hear those people--whom we despise--who say, ‘Well, I turn off the phone machine and lock the door and every morning at 10 o’clock I sit down and write.’ I’m happy to report that when I’ve tried that, what I write stinks. It’s no good. I sort of think that I write by generation, not evolution. Suddenly I’ll figure something out and I’ll work very, very hard and I’ll go through the Paleolithic Era and then evolution stops for a little while.”

She leans back against the booth. Tattoo number two--a malo flower, the Chinese symbol for perseverance--pokes through the collar of her shirt.

“I am a hard-working writer. I am now able to give myself that. I’m just not good at that sort of slow-and-steady thing.”

*

Mind you, McCracken seems to have been pacing steadily toward a literary career right from the start. She grew up in the Boston suburbs, in “rootin’ tootin’ high falutin’ Newton.” Despite her nickname--Mad Dog--she was “one of those disgusting writer kids.”

From high school she went to Boston University, and from Boston University to the Iowa Writers Workshop. From Iowa she headed for a writing fellowship at Cape Cod’s Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and only then did she begin to think in a career-conscious sort of way.

She packed off to Drexel University’s library science school, an academic endeavor she described as “not exactly rigorous” but about which she’s reluctant to gripe.

“I will just express this one frustration with library science school,” McCracken gleefully indulges, “and it’s something that Peggy Cort complains about too: You never talk about the romance. Standing behind that desk and being nice to people all day long. . . .” Here, McCracken pauses, nostalgic for her days behind the circulation desk at the Somerville Public Library, a job she recently quit. “Finding books for people is terrifically romantic. I’d like to go back to library work some day, perhaps as a volunteer. Practically any problem anybody comes to you with you can solve.”

What’s next for McCracken, however, is not tracking down wayward books but completing her second novel. The story is set in Iowa, that much she’ll reveal, and having exhausted the subject of library work--though she’s intrigued by an idea of her brother’s: a TV sitcom called “The Library,” starring Rosey Greer--McCracken is thinking about hanging out in a dog grooming shop on Wednesday mornings each week.

“I enjoyed writing about work so much I feel like I should go get another job,” McCracken laughs, tipping the last of her whiskey.

Nonetheless, with her furniture in place and her success emerging, McCracken is reasonable enough to keep fiddling with apple butter stains and foraging for crackers--that is to say, writing--awhile.