"Don’t trust a writer who gives out advice. Writers are suckers for pretty turns of phrase with only the ring of truth."
The narrator of Elizabeth McCracken's The Hero of This Book is a writer. As a writer, she is capable of speaking on what makes a writer. And the narrator takes a fairly dim view of those in her profession: she thinks that writers who give out advice are more concerned with telling a good story or sounding good than actually dolling out useful and true advice. This gives more depth to the narrator, who readers begin to see as more cynical and disillusioned with some in her profession.
"I've always hated the notion, in life or in fiction, that the human personality is a puzzle to be solved, that we are a single flashback away from understanding why this person is cruel to her children, why that man has a dreamy, downcast look. A human being is not a lock and the past is not a key."
This is one of the most important pieces of characterization about the narrator. The narrator uniquely sees people. In her mind, she sees people as complex creatures whose behavior cannot simply be explained by one thing that happened in their past. Human beings are not a puzzle. One event, in other words, doesn't define who a person is and doesn't give writers and readers a key to unlocking who someone fully is. In the narrator's mind, this goes against the grain of other writers who feel that one event can become who a person is.
"Come to Mommy," my mother would say to one of [her cats]. "Yes, I love you, too."
"You are not that cat's mother," I said, sitting on the sofa during a visit.
This quote illuminates just how lonely the narrator's mother is. She has spent so much of her life alone that she has created a world in which is the mother to her cats. Ignoring the fact that she cannot possibly be her cat's mother, that feeling comes from her deep desire to be loved and useful. This makes the narrator feel strange about her mother's behavior (she also feels pity for her mother).
