The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays, by CJ Hauser

Deconstructing the love stories we've been sold

Memoirs with Melissa shares bimonthly reviews intended to expose readers to diverse authors and life experiences. To see more of what I’m reading, browse my virtual memoir shelf on Goodreads.

Back in the days when Facebook was still driving traffic to publications, an essay in the Paris Review made a viral run through my online circle of friends. At the time, I had a whole website dedicated to articulating my experiences and insights around transcending unhealthy relationships. This one essay, “The Crane Wife” by CJ Hauser, humbled me. What a concise, profound handling of a subject that flummoxes so many people.

Hauser’s original Crane Wife essay, about the demise of her engagement and study of the whooping crane, is included in her memoir collection and is a good representation of the others you’ll find inside. If you loved what you read in the Paris Review, you’re bound to find some new favorites here. 

Taken as a whole, Hauser’s memoir investigates the love stories we’ve inherited and been sold. Her personal stories aim to make peace with her history while freeing her and her readers to invent their own narratives moving forward. As with some memoirs in essays, these ones aren’t redundant. If she revisits a story, she makes note of it and tells you why it’s important to the current essay. 

“It is amazing that those of us who do not find love young muster the strength to try again—years of history clattering behind us like so many tin cans dragged behind a wedding sedan.” From the essay “Blood: Twenty-Seven Love Stories” by CJ Hauser

A few of my favorites: 1.) “Nights We Didn’t” acknowledges Hauser’s bisexual identity by reclaiming queer situations from her past that she first experienced as merely hotbeds of feelings, confusion, and silence. 2.) “The Two-Thousand-Pound Bee” is another masterful braided essay, one thread being her journey to spread her grandparents’ ashes. Hauser does this in a way that’s authentic and void of cliche, something she also brings to her writing about the common human experience of love. 3.) “Uncoupling” untangles the idea that life partnership and parenthood have to happen in tandem, all couched in the literary device of Hauser’s tits (a word she chooses deliberately and with explanation).

It’s easy to see why The Crane Wife was a 2023 finalist in the Bisexual Nonfiction category of the Lambda Literary Awards. I remain in awe of how Hauser uses narrative structure to deconstruct the stories we've been told about love and romantic partnership. 

Read this one. You won't be disappointed.

---

All my reviews are public. I welcome and value every free subscriber. Paid subscriptions are an extra way to support my work and help this project succeed. Thank you!