Oof. This isn’t the book I thought it was going to be and that’s on me I guess. DNF for now. Thanks for the opportunity to read!

Hauser's expansion of collected essays feels like sitting down in a corner booth with a phenomenal stranger you've just met, who you think may just wind up being a friend for life.

This book was such a fascinating mix of things. At times overtly feminist, funny, witty, reflective, and/or contemplative. The essays cover a wide range of topics and include pop culture, classic literature, and music references interspersed in a way that helps further a point or juxtaposed against a story that the author is telling. I was drawn into the writing and the stories being told in this unique and quirky way.

This is the first writing I've encountered by this author - and the fact that it was a memoir was an interesting introduction. At times I wasn't exactly sure what to take away from an essay and at other times I knew exactly what I would take away and wanted to underline/annotate and tab the section so I could keep going back to it. There are sprinkles of direct insight and wisdom that cut through sections of prose and I could see these essays appealing to a wide range of people because of the distinct differences in each story being told.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC to read and review. All thoughts are my own.

When I read CJ Hauser’s original essay which went viral I was intrigued so I was looking forward to reading this memoir in essays. It mostly worked. Some didn’t, but that’s fine. They won’t always. Overall, it was a wonderful piece of writing and should be enjoyed.

"This kind of living isn’t the absence of story or of life. It’s just a story happening so slowly you can’t really see it taking place. It’s something that is plodding along, changing, and growing at such a rate that most people lose interest in it. But I think it’s there. I think it’s possible. And if such happiness exists, I believe it is a slow-growing thing. I think that sustained, lived-in happiness, to the naked eye, might look a lot like stillness."

I love books that strike a great balance between laugh-out-loud funny and very thoughtful reflection. CJ Hauser takes a look at their relationships, specifically romantic entanglements, but also friends and family, throughout their life, and manages to pull out connections to movies, books, comedians, and whatever else helps them contextualize what they've been through. I don't relate to all of their stories, because we see the world and relationships very differently, but it still tugged on my heart and made me think about how differently we all move through the world and how at our core we all just want to be loved. Anyway, I loved this book so so much - it's such a fantastic collection of essays and I totally recommend!

I received this book in exchange for an honest review from NetGalley.

Like many people, I loved the author's essay, The Crane Wife. I was hoping the rest of the book would have the same insightful and funny writing. There were indeed pockets of that, but many of the essays strongly evoked the navel-gazing of a college admissions essay. Although the book itself was not long, parts felt very unnecessary and dragged out on a whim. While this is billed as a memoir in essays, I believe the memoir and story aspect of it is missing, leaving it as more of a memoir in fragments.

Overall, it seems as though there wasn't enough material for a full book, and I began to skim through large parts.

This is a witty essay collection. The author shares incidents from her childhood, adolescence and adulthood through some interesting frameworks.She also shares epiphanies about dating and relationships that many people can identify. These epiphanies are written in clever ways. Each of the essays has a different structure and voice. The author skillfully writes in first, second and third person. A feat many authors cannot achieve.

A memoir written in essays exploring love, relationships, and identity. I thought this collection started out in a really compelling way but I got lost through the halfway point. It was a bit too redundant for me, but that’s not to say there weren’t essays I loved! I really enjoyed the title essay and the one about The Philadelphia Story. This has been a huge hit, so I think it was more of a me problem than anything!

The essays start out disjointed and continue that way for the duration of my reading experience. There was no foundation to prepare the reader for these free-floating and meandering essays, and not enough background to keep me tethered to the story and the author herself.

Maybe I'm not the target audience? I just didn't really get it.

DNFed @ 14%

I saw The Crane Wife by CJ Hauser being lauded by a couple of influencers I follow, and I was intrigued by the concept. This memoir in essay collection was a deeply moving exploration of self. It's vulnerable, wry, and oh so smart. It's the type of book that makes you wish you could have a cup of coffee with the author and talk about what you've learned and are still learning about life.

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for sharing this book with me. All thoughts are my own.

I fell in love, like most people did, with the Crane Wife when it was published as an article in the NYer. A colleague of mine sent it to me and I read the whole piece immediately, couldn’t take my eyes of it. Though this collection by CJ Hauser is less thrilling to read than the Crane Wife, it’s just as intelligent and touching. I’m not sure why I could put this small volume down as much as I did in between reading other novels—perhaps collections like these are meant to be read in small doses, at least for me. Though I enjoyed it, it took me a while to get through, which for the length of it was probably an err on the reader than the collection.

An essay collection about love, identity, and the stories we tell ourselves.

As someone who somehow missed the title essay when it went viral, I wish I'd read that first, then began on page 1. Reading this book through, it took me several attempts/essays to find my groove.

CJ Hauser's writing can be a bit meandering at times -- my personal taste would be for several of the essays to be tightened up. But I loved the ways in which she talks about how relationships crumble, and the roads not taken.

Thank you for the advanced copy of this book! I will be posting my review on social media, to include Instagram, Amazon, Goodreads, and Instagram!

This collection of essays by CJ Hauser gives us insight into the writer that is at times so vulnerable and raw you feel like a close friend telling you their secrets. The title story especially struck me and resonated deeply, in a way I haven't experienced. I look forward to more of Hauser's work.

This collection of essays is like having coffee with your super witty English major friend. It made me new want to look at the media I consume, the friends I surround myself with, my work - and how it all affects my life. I learned so much about myself, The Philadelphia Story, John Belushi, whooping cranes, chosen family, and more I can't wait to read all CJ Hauser has to offer.

Gorgeous and thoughtful essays. If you enjoyed Hauser's viral essay of the same name, you'll love this book, which has so much intellect and heart. I had a wonderful time reading it — to the point that I went to the store so I could underline my own copy. I loved what Hauser had to say about modern life and love, and I loved the cultural references. A favorite of the year for sure.

Very, very rarely, a marketing team from a publisher will reach out and offer an eARC I haven't requested through NetGalley. In the past when this has happened, it's been for books I'd never heard of, and once or twice I went ahead and downloaded them. But when Doubleday reached out and offered me The Crane Wife, I downloaded it immediately, as I'd recently heard several excellent reviews, and I've had her 2019 novel, Family of Origin, on my TBR for years. While I didn't get to it before publication this time, I am thrilled to say that I absolutely loved this collection of essays and will definitely be reading her backlist and whatever she wants to write in the future.

In the text itself, Hauser explains that she never intended to write a memoir or an essay collection, but after her title essay, "The Crane Wife" went viral in The Paris Review in 2019, more readers tried to convince her to do so. What came about was a collection of 18 essays, including "The Crane Wife" that reflect Hauser's coming-of-age of sorts (as we thirty-somethings are still doing), including career, identity, and love life ramblings. Her narrative voice is exactly the kind I love to read -- personal, intimate, smart, and often very funny. Her writing makes me think I would gladly meet her for coffee and lose track of the day as we sat and chatted for hours. I highlighted so many passages of her essays (not a common occurrence for me), both because they were great pieces of writing and incredibly relatable. It's hard for me to pick a favorite essay (or even a few favorites), as so many were so great, but the later essay "Uncoupling" was certainly one of the most powerful of the bunch.

I am so glad to have received an advanced copy of this, because otherwise who knows when I would have gotten around to it (seeing as I still haven't gotten my hands of Family of Origin). I will definitely be pursuing her backlist and will gladly read whatever it is she chooses to publish next. Many thanks to Doubleday and Netgalley for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

4.5 Stars

I really enjoyed CJ Hauser's debut novel, Family of Origin, so I was looking forward to reading this memoir. Well-crafted essays with a lot of introspection about when your life doesn’t go according to plan.

I really enjoyed her writing and the insights she brought to her relationships and life. I also really appreciated the positive, soft, and thoughtful tone she brought to most of her essays.

J Hauser Is Making Meaning from a Fragmented Life
Ladane Nasseri interviews CJ Hauser about her memoir in essays ‘The Crane Wife,’ the impact of a viral publication, and the braided-essay form.

Like many, I came to CJ Hauser’s work via her viral essay “The Crane Wife,” which published three years ago. The piece—a braiding of at first seemingly unrelated topics into a meaningful and candid narrative with a satisfying landing—drew over a million readers.

“The Crane Wife” is the title essay of Hauser’s memoir in essays, and if you appreciated its introspective tone, your enjoyment is bound to multiply with her latest book. The Crane Wife consists of similarly surprising combinations and self-reflective musings, woven together with Hauser’s warm and witty voice. In one story about her ideal home, she sets to interview kids about their dream houses and reports back. Some of the essays are whimsical, while others take on a melancholy tone—though never for too long, because as Hauser says, “In the thick of our feelings, we are a family who cracks a joke and hopes for the best.”

In these essays incorporating family, friends, and lovers, Hauser’s efforts to negotiate these ties and examine what constitutes a meaningful life are in full display. Her essays are about stories told and stories absorbed, stories that ended and stories that never quite began—stories that the author for too long did not even know were worthy of being named as such. “What stories were you told, and not told, about the shape of love, the shape of yourself, the shape of a happy life?” she asks in these pages. “What were you told had to happen in a story for it to feel complete?”

Hauser and I spoke on Zoom earlier this month. Our conversation was edited for clarity and length.

***
Ladane Nasseri: These days, writers are often told that having a viral essay increases their chance of getting an agent and a book deal. You had already published two novels, so it was different for you, but how did the book come about after the success of that essay? Did the fact that it went viral give you momentum to write the memoir or make it more challenging because it raised the stakes?

CJ Hauser: I tell my students to make a thing because it is the weirdest, truest thing you have to write, and I have to believe it will find the people it needs to find—whether that’s a couple people or a lot of people. That’s how I worked for years, and normally my writing had reached just a couple people. All you can do is write your weird thing, and this weird thing happened to reach a lot of people. I would have never written this book if what happened with the essay had not happened. I had no intention of writing nonfiction about myself; I had a novel I was working on. My editor said, “So, are we thinking about nonfiction?” and I was like, “Absolutely not. This changes nothing about the art I’m going to make.” After being stubborn and petulant for a while, I got excited that people were having conversations about the stuff in the essay. I had a bunch of other ideas—I had been keeping a document of nonfiction ideas for some time. I went on my sabbatical and was going to keep writing the novel, and I thought, I’ll just take these notes with me and see what happens. I was writing both and then got hooked on the Belushi essay. At that point I thought, Sorry, novel, you have to wait, because I’m now deeply obsessed with John Belushi.

LN: You knew this was going to be a memoiristic endeavor, but did you know it was going to be in the form of an essay collection?

CJH: It was always going to be fragmented. I read memoirs. I love memoirs. I love when someone can see their life in that beautiful book-like shape, but there are too many different parts of my life and there is not one unifying story, which is what this book is about: Why does it sometimes feel like your life does not have one unifying story? Like “This is my marriage and I’m celebrating my fiftieth anniversary,” or “This is my career and look how beautiful this arc of success is.” When the shape of your life does not translate into this unifying narrative, it sometimes feels like you are doing it wrong, or the things you’ve done don’t count or were just trials for the ones that will work out later. I wanted the structure of the book to make meaning from a life that is fragmented and make it feel like a whole thing without pretending it was unified the whole time.

LN: In my own writing, I sometimes feel a tension between having a plan and wanting to know what I am writing toward and allowing space for surprises and discoveries. How do you approach this?

CJH: I knew there were pieces I wanted to write, unified by this idea of making meaning from our life with story shapes, talking back to that, and breaking it a little bit. I also wanted to talk about love, but love in a broader way than just romantic partnerships. I wanted to talk about books and art. Those things were percolating around, but I had no idea what I was doing. I had an index card board—I call it a “murder board”—on the wall with different pieces and where they would go. As things came together and the pieces started speaking to each other, the process of working with my editor and agent became one of “What does this piece have to say to that one?”

LN: So did you have a sense of the through line, or did that come in the process, as you looked back at what you had written?

CJH: I wanted the essays to have—if not a through line—an emotional arc as a whole. “The Crane Wife” essay was largely about “How the hell did I let this happen?” Sometimes when a person is overeducated, like I am—I am a feminist, I am open-minded—you think they are not going to wind up in this thing that makes them small, and yet I did. Knowing as many things as I know, and still making terrible decisions. Insomuch as this essay is the reason why this book came to be, the question was, “How did I get here and where am I going to go now that I realize I’m a person to whom that can happen?” I knew I wanted to go back to family and see what the stories that I have been given about love are; how we are supposed to act in love? Which stories did I chuck, and which did I keep sneakily stored away with me over time? I had a phase where I thought I could be hyperrational, like, “I will read ten more bell hooks books and then I will be fine.” That doesn’t work. So I wanted to write about what it meant to try to hold on tight and logically solve things and to have to let go of that. There is no way to protect yourself with rules; there is an amount of risk and danger in love that feels implicit to it. The last section is about “What are we going to build here? What does a more expansive and more vulnerable view of this look like?”

LN: In therapy, one approach consists of getting the patient to tell old stories in a new way. It feels like that’s what you were doing, looking at some life stories differently, starting with how you told them to yourself.

CJH: It’s exactly that. It’s so powerful to do that. It does not deny the hurt of what happened before, or the struggle of it, but it was not serving me to keep telling myself the stories the original way. It felt empowering to say, “Here are the love stories of my life, they matter, they all count, even if they’re [with] people who are not in my life anymore, even if they’re [with] people who we would not think of as love stories.”

LN: You have several epiphanies in these essays. Some spur from friends’ comments, or lines in books or movies, and sometimes I felt it was the result of your thinking on the page. Did you have these epiphanies and want to write about them, or did they manifest as you were writing and being exploratory on the page?

CJH: That’s a cool question. I hadn’t thought about that. It’s both. With the Belushi essay, there was no epiphany I was writing toward. I did not know for ages what that essay was about. I just knew I was interested and there was something there. I write partly because I love this feeling of searching for meaning and making meaning. Sometimes I don’t finish essays because they don’t resolve into something that feels worth it to me. Sometimes, [other] people tell me it’s not working. When someone says it’s not working it’s not because they don’t get it—it’s because you haven’t found the thing yet that’s going to make it work. It’s frustrating, but it’s the highest high when you finally crack it, and you get to that place of “Yeah! This is what I was trying to figure out.” That was a big part of the experience of writing the book, and so there are live epiphanies on the page!

LN: It’s a delicate balancing act. It takes playing around to find the right idea, the right symbolism or image, but you still want the story to stay true to the experience and your feelings at the time. You don’t want to change it by engineering it too much.

CJH: Yes. There are many ways to make the experience you had come alive for the reader, feel more like it felt to you, and it’s constructed: A play is more constructed than reality, but sometimes putting on a play helps it come across in a way a video recording of what happened never would. Leaving room for messiness and fragments and [not forcing things] to fall into a particular shape is a big part of that.

LN: You jump in time, you shift POV, sometimes you address the reader directly. How much leeway did you give yourself so that the form of these essays is not repetitive but so there is some coherence as a whole?

CJH: If you have an intuitive reason for why a story needs to be taken out of order, told in a stylized way, or have braided threads, then normally you will find a way to revise it and make it work for the reader. It starts with gut choices. I don’t usually start with form.

LN: What do you start with?

CJH: There is a practice I have gotten into. I have something labeled a “garbage draft”—sometimes I call it a compost heap. I just draft; I write words and words. I have another document opened to the right and it’s called “scrap and sources.” Anytime I look something up, I read a book, I add it there. I make sure I have a list of everything I have consulted. I want to find my way back to everything. The garbage draft starts to come together as I pass through it and more things migrate over to the scrap.

LN: The threads in “The Crane Wife” essay (breaking your engagement, going on the scientific expedition, and reading the folklore story) all seemed to happen around the same time. How did you choose the braids for some of the other essays?

CJH: Like what gets blended with what? It’s just weird up here [in my head]! Sometimes it’s hard to communicate, even with friends—because I want to tell you about this thing I’ve come to understand, but I need to talk a lot about robots to get there. That’s just who I am as a person! Other times I know it’s something I want to write about because I’m obsessed with it, like The X-Files, while the wedding of my friends Liv and Meg was a meaningful experience. It was such an honor to be asked to be at the helm of a wedding. I knew I wanted to write about it, but I didn’t have anything to say other than “these people are in love, it’s beautiful.” Neither of these are essays on their own, but sometimes these things are kicking around your brain and then one day they get close enough to each other to develop a magnetic pull and you think, Oh, interesting! Maybe if I put these two in conversation, there is something to be said.

LN: Your voice is one of the things that stands out throughout all these essays. You have talked about coming across some of the original, unedited stories of Raymond Carver and how in those versions, he was “full of sweetness and kindness to the world.” Is voice revealed with practice or constructed through revisions and editing? And how did you develop your writerly voice?

CJH: It’s both of those over the course of a life of writing. Voice was not something I was working on here; I am old enough to have been writing long enough. My voice is my voice at this point. When I was younger, it was constructed and I was trying on different hats, like you do when you are growing up: “Today I am going to high school and I am definitely a punk, and I am so tough.” And the next day it’s “Today I am wearing my rainbow mittens and I am a soft person.” You are trying to figure out who you are and eventually you are like, “Oh! I am all these things.” When I was younger and I was writing, I was trying on things for size. I wrote bad knockoff Carver, bad knockoff Salinger. By trying on the voices of people who seemed powerful to me, or who seemed emotionally moving to me, they probably all became part of my voice. So it is constructed, but it was a while ago. I also read out loud when I am drafting, and if something doesn’t sound like it could come out of my mouth in real life, it goes.

LN: The first line in your acknowledgment reads, “This is the unlikeliest of books. I meant to go on inventing people and islands and ducks in fictional perpetuity and never write about myself at all.” What had stopped you until then?

CJH: I’m not that interested in myself. I like to read to escape myself and I like to write to escape myself. The experience of therapy is one of the things that made me realize that spending time thinking about myself and how I work inside is not antithetical to art, and that maybe it would be enjoyable, and fruitful, to not put up a puppet play of fiction for once. I still love fiction the most, but therapy opened me up to the fact that maybe if I looked at myself for more than a minute, it wouldn’t be the death of art or the death of me.

LN: You have said, “I mostly write essays about things I have been wrong about. This is what I’m interested in.” Tell me more.

CJH: This is also the kind of nonfiction I’m interested in reading. People finding problems, learning moments, the times things broke, and times things healed. I have zero percent interest in reading books about, “Here is the story of my success and how I figured it all out and became very good at the thing.” That is a valuable thing to write, a valuable thing to read, but that is not where my heart is. I’m interested in moments when I think I figured things out. If this whole book is a recursive mental process, the mental process is like, “I learned a thing, I know a thing,” and then it’s like, “Oh, lost it again, it broke,” or “it wasn’t true all the time.” This book is about how there is no such thing—at least for me—as stable ground forever. Even if you find people who are long-term love stories, that too is going to grow in bends and you’re going to be wrong, and you will have to wiggle around to make sure it’s something you can carry forward. I write a lot about being wrong, but it’s being wrong as in, “Oh, look! Here’s another time I thought I figured it out, and here’s the world reminding us to be humble and curious and open.”

I adore a memoir-in-essays and this one was no different. I especially love them in audiobook format which is how I finished this one since I get to hear the author put the emotional inflection they want into each piece.

Hauser is funny, vulnerable, soft, and poetic. She writes about life and love and the joys of friendship and the many forms relationships and intimacy come in. I appreciated this conversation she seems to work through during each story about intimacy. She comes back to it over and over again. The expectation of what people should want and settle for from relationships and intimacy, what romantic relationships and platonic should look like, etc. I loved hearing from this women who may never marry, who may always be single, but is so far from being alone. She's created some very beautiful relationships and has fostered this massive space in her life for them.

I think these essays are well-paced and written in an honest, forthright, conversational style that I love. I can't wait to read more from Hauser.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for my ARC!