A memoir in essays that expands on the viral sensation "The Crane Wife" with a frank and funny look at love, intimacy, and self in the twenty-first century. From friends and lovers to blood family and chosen family, this "elegant masterpiece" (Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling℗author of℗Hunger) asks what more expansive℗definitions of love might offer us all. "An intellectually vigorous and emotionally resonant account of how a self gets created over time, The Crane Wife will satisfy and inspire anyone who has ever asked, 'How did I get here, and what happens now?'... Hauser builds her life's inventory out of deconstructed personal narratives, resulting in a reading experience that's rich like a complicated dessert - not for wolfing down but for savoring in small bites." - The New York Times Ten days after calling off her wedding, CJ Hauser went on an expedition to Texas to study the whooping crane. After a week wading through the gulf, she realized she'd almost signed up to live someone else's life. In this intimate, frank, and funny℗memoir-in-essays,℗Hauser℗releases herself from traditional narratives of happiness and goes looking for℗ways of living that leave room for the unexpected, making plenty of mistakes along the way.℗She kisses Internet strangers and officiates at a wedding. She rereads Rebecca in the house her boyfriend once shared with his ex-wife and rewinds Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story to learn how not to lose yourself in a relationship.℗She thinks about Florence Nightingale at a robot convention and grief at John Belushi's rock and roll gravesite, and the difference between those stories we're asked to hold versus those we choose to carry.℗She writes about friends and lovers, blood family and chosen family, and asks what more expansive℗definitions of love might offer us all. Told with the late-night barstool directness of your wisest, most bighearted friend, The Crane Wife is a book for everyone whose life doesn't look the way they thought it would; for everyone learning to find joy in the not-knowing; for everyone 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. ...
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