An astonishing memoir-in-essays
Ten days after calling off her wedding, CJ Hauser went on an expedition to study the whooping crane. She realized she'd been trapped by her own narratives about love, ones that looked like other people's. But what if there were room for a different kind of story? New definitions of love?
In this intimate, frank and funny memoir-in-essays, CJ Hauser releases herself from her story of How Life Was Supposed to Be. She searches for new narratives - ones that make room for strangeness, and not-knowing. Ones that feel more honest. She kisses internet strangers, officiates a wedding, visits a fertility clinic. She re-reads Rebecca in the house her new boyfriend shared with his ex-wife and re-winds Katherine 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.
The Crane Wife is a book for anyone whose life doesn't look the way they thought it would; for anyone learning to find joy in the unexpected; for anyone trying, if sometimes failing, to build a new sort of life story, a new sort of family, a new sort of home, to live in.
