The crane wife : a memoir in essays

Author

CJ Hauser

Call Number

• 921 H3763 (CEN)

Browse similar titles by call number

Edition

First edition.

Publication Information

New York : Doubleday, [2022]

Physical Description

x, 308 pages ; 22 cm

Summary

"CJ Hauser expands on her viral essay sensation, "The Crane Wife," in a brilliant collection of essays that echo the work of Cheryl Strayed in their revelatory observations of romantic love. CJ Hauser uses her now-beloved title essay as an anchor around which to explore the narratives of romantic love we are taught and which we tell ourselves, and the need to often rewrite those narratives to find an accurate version of ourselves in them. Told with a late-night barstool directness, through the sort of giddy confidences that usually pass between friends, Hauser relates, in dark and often funny ways, the pain of feeling out of sync with the world when you're going through the motions of a life story that doesn't match your reality. With unlikely guides from Katharine Hepburn to Defense Department robots to whooping cranes to golden era SNL comedians to Special Agent Dana Scully, Hauser grapples with the art she loves to mine new understanding of what these sorts of narratives might have to offer as a way forward. These essays follow Hauser as she dismantles the narrative expectations she carried inside her, letting go of the roles she performed to make others comfortable, and seeking joy by tending relationships with community and chosen family--love stories in their own right. The essays capture the daily work of trying, if sometimes failing, to architect a new sort of life story, a new sort of family, a sort of home, to live in. The Crane Wife and Other Essays asks what more inclusive storytelling about family and love and growth might offer us all. A book for anyone who's ever been in love with love, anyone whose life doesn't look the way they thought it would, and anyone who ever wondered: am I doing this right?"--

Contents

• Blood: twenty-seven love stories
• Act one: the mechanicals
• Hepburn qua Hepburn
• The man behind the curtain
• The crane wife
• Kind of deep blue
• Act two: The Fantasticks
• The lady with the lamp
• Mulder, it's me
• Nights we didn't
• Act three: Dulcinea quits
• The second Mrs. de Winter
• The two-thousand-pound bee
• Unwalling Jackson's castle
• The fox farm
• Uncoupling
• Siberian watermelon.