Cj Hauser

"CJ Hauser expands on her viral essay sensation, "The Crane Wife," in a brilliant collection of essays that echo the work of Cheryl Strayed in their revelatory observations of romantic love. CJ Hauser uses her now-beloved title essay as an anchor around which to explore the narratives of romantic love we are taught and which we tell ourselves, and the need to often rewrite those narratives to find an accurate version of ourselves in them. Told with a late-night barstool directness, through the sort of giddy confidences that usually pass between friends, Hauser relates, in dark and often funny ways, the pain of feeling out of sync with the world when you're going through the motions of a life story that doesn't match your reality. With unlikely guides from Katharine Hepburn to Defense Department robots to whooping cranes to golden era SNL comedians to Special Agent Dana Scully, Hauser grapples with the art she loves to mine new understanding of what these sorts of narratives might have to offer as a way forward. These essays follow Hauser as she dismantles the narrative expectations she carried inside her, letting go of the roles she performed to make others comfortable, and seeking joy by tending relationships with community and chosen family--love stories in their own right. The essays capture the daily work of trying, if sometimes failing, to architect a new sort of life story, a new sort of family, a sort of home, to live in. The Crane Wife and Other Essays asks what more inclusive storytelling about family and love and growth might offer us all. A book for anyone who's ever been in love with love, anyone whose life doesn't look the way they thought it would, and anyone who ever wondered: am I doing this right?"--

A Memoir in Essays

The Crane Wife

A novel at turns exuberant and wise, in the vein of The Family Fang and The Portable Veblen, about estranged half-siblings yoked together on a swampy Gulf Coast island after their biologist father's drowning. Welcome to Leap's Island, where a group of fringe scientists are obsessively studying the Undowny Bufflehead, a rare species of sea duck whose loss of waterproof feathers proves, they say, that evolution is running backward. Into this world of so-called "Reversalists" come Elsa and Nolan Grey, a half-brother and sister whose father, Dr. Ian Grey, has recently drowned while desperately trying to prove his own evolutionary theories. His estranged children find themselves on a pilgrimage to jointly reclaim his belongings and his memory, and to try to understand the stakes of the research he abandoned them to pursue. The Grey children, as the islanders come to call them, despite their being 35 and 29 years old, are incredulous that their brilliant father could have believed in Reversalism's pseudo-science. But as the siblings search for an elusive sea bird, confront the island's eccentrics, and hunt for signs their father still believed in progress, a darker question haunts them: is it their fault Dr. Ian Grey gave up on us all? Delightfully funny and fiercely original, Family of Origin grapples with questions of nature and nurture, evolution and mating, intimacy and betrayal, progress and forgiveness.

Family of Origin

"An elegant masterpiece...Wry but also warm and generous." --Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Hunger A Time Most Anticipated Book of 2022 - CJ Hauser expands on her viral sensation "The Crane Wife" with ​seventeen further essays in this intimate, frank, and funny book about love in the twenty-first century 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.

Cj Hauser

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