The Crane Wife

'Funny, exciting, vulnerable - truly visionary' Alexander CheeTen days after calling off her wedding, CJ Hauser went on an expedition to study the whooping crane. After a week wading through the gulf, she realised she had almost signed up to live somebody else's life.In this intimate, frank and funny memoir in essays, CJ Hauser releases herself from her story of 'how life was supposed to be'. She goes looking for more honest ways of living, for new definitions of love. She kisses internet strangers, officiates a wedding, visits a fertility clinic. She rereads Rebecca in the house her new boyfriend shared with his ex-wife and rewinds Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story to ask whether you can ever have a fresh start with an old love. She writes about friends and lovers and blood family and chosen family and children and animals and ghosts and a whole planet in this book, and hopes you see all of these as love stories.

Outstanding . . . An elegant masterpiece . . . Wry but also warm and generous -- Roxane Gay
Thoughtful and fitfully funny . . . Across 17 confessional essays, we find [CJ] furtively spreading her grandparents' ashes at their old house in Martha's Vineyard, contemplating breast reduction surgery and reflecting on her relationships with a high-school boyfriend and a divorcee who is clearly still in love with his ex Guardian, Best Memoirs of 2022
Brilliant and beautiful . . . An absolute must-read -- Frances Cha, author of IF I HAD YOUR FACE
Hauser is refreshingly candid and self-aware. They're unafraid to get into the hard stuff-and it's that vulnerability that makes their writing so accessible. Simultaneously clever, heartfelt, and wrenching, The Crane Wife underlines the messy relationship we all have with love TIME, 100 Must-Read Books of 2022
Bold and brilliant and psychologically exquisite, CJ Hauser is a deeply gifted and generous writer. THE CRANE WIFE is enthralling -- Charlotte Fox Weber, author of WHAT WE WANT
Sometimes a viral essay is just a viral essay. Other times, as with Hauser's story of breaking off her engagement (written for The Paris Review), a piece that spoke to millions will lead to something bigger - in this case, an absorbing memoir in essays New York Times Book Review, Editors' Pick
Funny and tender Sun
After reading this memoir-in-essays by the warm, wise, wry, and wonderful CJ Hauser, author of the viral Paris Review essay "The Crane Wife," you'll have to go fix your face. Were you crying laughing or just crying? Both? Splash some cold water on your cheeks. That's it. Now, go forth in peace with a new understanding of what it means to live and love Garden & Gun, Best Southern Books of 2022
A deeply personal and vivacious memoir . . . eye-wateringly funny . . . [and] intensely introspective as she focuses on what she is looking for and what she feels is missing Irish Examiner
Stunning and interrogative. . . Brilliant. . . Calling Hauser 'honest' and 'vulnerable' feels inadequate. She embraces and even celebrates her flaws, and she revels in being a provocateur. . . Much has been written on the themes Hauser excavates here, yet her perspective is singular, startlingly so. Many narratives still position finding the perfect match as a measure of whether we've led successful lives. The Crane Wife dispenses with that. For that reason, Hauser's worldview feels fresh and even radical Oprah Daily
Intimate, all-too-relatable magic. Hauser writes like she's whispering hard-earned secrets to a friend, picking apart how she has been held hostage to her own fantasies about love and happiness in warm and vulnerable scenes. . . What a gift it is, to have the curtains lift and let us all in Electric Lit
As Hauser grapples with the changing shape of her life story, it's fitting that the shape of each essay and, indeed, the shape of the collection itself, are self-consciously experimental in form. . . Reading The Crane Wife is a bit like following Hauser into the Mirror Maze, her voice as narrator guiding the way through and out. Whether writing about familial or cultural stories, each text becomes a mirror in which Hauser sees herself reflected back. And in her willingness to turn inward, to truly face herself, Hauser's essays open outward, becoming themselves mirrors into which readers might gaze Ploughshares
I absolutely LOVED these essays. I knew I ought to ration myself to one a day in order to prolong the joy and fascination of them, but I just couldn't: I had to carry on reading and reading, like eating a whole packet of jelly babies in one sitting. What a fantastic, original, funny and touching voice! C J Hauser is a wondrous writer. This book will give so much happiness -- Cressida Connolly, author of AFTER THE PARTY
Compassionate and funny and brave. The book is a masterclass in life writing, and a lesson in how to live a life outside the narratives that would contain us. CJ is a master story weaver. I was left wanting more, in the best way possible -- Charlie Gilmour, author of Featherhood
In The Crane Wife, Hauser undertakes a new way for her to tell stories from her life, playing with history and personal history, exploring the possible hidden truths in her family's past and her own. The result is like interconnected short stories but about her life, the person she is and was, maybe even the person she never knew herself to be. Funny, exciting, vulnerable - truly visionary. -- Alexander Chee, author of QUEEN OF THE NIGHT and HOW TO WRITE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL
The Crane Wife more than delivers on the immense promise of the viral essay that served as its source. My goodness is it funny, but also so devastatingly honest and bracing. Reading it is like taking a long road trip with your wisest, sharpest friend and talking the entire way. -- R. Eric Thomas, bestselling author of Here For It
The Crane Wife is brilliant and beautiful - the vulnerability of her viral essay is expanded to include immense humour, pondering and further misadventures of the heart. An absolute must-read. I will be gifting this book all year long -- Frances Cha, internationally bestselling author of IF I HAD YOUR FACE
In this perceptive and probing work, Hauser brilliantly parses the myths that shaped her understanding of love. . . Sparkling. . . A thrillingly original deconstruction of desire and its many configurations Publishers Weekly, starred review
Hauser is a delightful and agile writer, capable of speaking in multiple registers, but what all of her essays have in common is honesty, wisdom, a certain loopiness-she's an old soul with a fresh perspective and an energetic, wandering mind. The result is an imaginative and beautiful memoir, one that'll be passed through the secret sisterhood of crane wives for years. -- Jennifer Senior
Readers looking for something a little different in a memoir will not be disappointed. The strongest essays exemplify Hauser's keen awareness about life so far: things don't always work out as planned, love is complicated, and trusting your gut is, sometimes, the best option. Library Journal
Perceptive and witty Shelf Awareness
Intimate, witty and beautifully crafted Elle
"I am a kind of breakup pro," Hauser writes late in this lively, thoughtful, and often funny set of personal essays-at a point when the reader has learned much about how unlucky in love she's been. . . Hauser makes a welcome effort to talk about both love and culture in unconventional ways. . . A smart, inviting, and candid clutch of self-assessments Kirkus Reviews
A staccato, funny, barbed, metaphor-laced, and thought-provoking memoir-in-essays. . . No matter her focus, Hauser's deductions about human nature are always arresting, delving, fresh, and exhilarating Booklist
While it's always difficult to summarize an essay collection, what holds The Crane Wife together is Hauser's unpacking of emotional truths: who do we love, and why, and what happens when they're gone? When we're alone? When we forget what it was like to love them? LitHub

CJ HAUSER teaches creative writing at Colgate University and lives in Hamilton, NY. They received their MFA from Brooklyn College and PhD from Florida State. They have published two novels, Family of Origin and The From-Aways. In 2019 they published a viral essay, The Crane Wife, in the Paris Review, about their decision to call off their wedding and go on an expedition to study the whooping crane. The essay reached over a million readers, was shared by 538 journalists from 293 different outlets all over the world, and recommended online by the likes of Roxane Gay, Busy Phillips and Caitlin Moran. The Crane Wife- A Memoir in Essays is their first work of full-length non-fiction.

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