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.

About the Author

CJ Hauser teaches creative writing at Colgate University and lives in Hamilton, NY. She received her MFA from Brooklyn College and PhD from Florida State. She has published two novels, Family of Origin and The From-Aways. In 2019 she published a viral essay, The Crane Wife, in the Paris Review, about her decision to call off her 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 her first work of full-length non-fiction.