That’s what makes this book both universal and exciting. It’s about the breaking of habits, about consciously developing agency over one’s own fate, and about the relief, wonder and even joy that might follow that grief ... 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. As she travels back and forth through personal history, she strings scenes together without excessive connective tissue ... She trusts us to follow along and get the gist ... A delightfully wide assortment of literary and cultural digressions enrich Hauser’s musings, making her book a lot of fun in a brainy, melancholic way ... The stories may be different for each of us, but the patterns reveal what we have in common as human beings. What a vital sense of connection both writer and reader get out of the experience ... there’s more to this memoir in essays than breakups and so much more to the book than the essay that started it 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?'
The grief essay is, or perhaps ought to be, a genre unto itself. Getting it right appears to involve an alchemy that braids personal loss with metaphorical — and often quotidian — parallels, all in gorgeous prose. Bonus points for leavening the pain with a bit humor. Hauser’s story of calling off her marriage to her cheating, gaslighting fiance, then finding grace while studying the whooping crane off the Gulf Coast of Texas, hit all of these notes ... Hauser is a playful, energetic and always likable writer, and to ask whether the rest of the collection rises to the level of the title essay is possibly the wrong question ... While the cumulative effect of reading these essays in succession is ultimately affecting, along the way it sometimes feels disjointed ... This is less a criticism than an existential question about the nature of essay collections: Are they meant to be read sequentially, or are they more like a restaurant menu ... Hauser...sets her own rules, both in the personal and narrative sense ... With its frank explorations of sexuality, grief and other intimate subjects, this book might not be for everyone. (It includes a detailed trigger warning.) Yet I kept thinking about all of the people in my life into whose hands I can’t wait to put The Crane Wife.
17 brilliant pieces ... This tumbling, in and out of love, structures the collection ... Calling Hauser 'honest' and 'vulnerable' feels inadequate. She embraces and even celebrates her flaws, and she revels in being a provocateur ... It is an irony that Hauser, a strong, smart, capable woman, relates to the crane wife’s contortions. She felt helpless in her own romantic relationship. I don’t have one female friend who has not felt some version of this, but putting it into words is risky ... this collection is not about neat, happy endings. It’s a constant search for self-discovery ... Much has been written on the themes Hauser excavates here, yet her perspective is singular, startlingly so. Many narratives still position finding the perfect match as a measure of whether we’ve led successful lives. The Crane Wife dispenses with that. For that reason, Hauser’s worldview feels fresh and even radical.
Hauser takes the reader along on a soulful journey of self-discovery as she brings together smart, astute observations on modern love and life ... The essays in this volume offer a fascinating blend of relationships and breakups, colorful family stories, and cultural and literary influences. In fluid prose, she pursues more fulfilling ways to find happiness ... What a pleasure it is be in the company of this writer. With clear eyes and an open heart, she finds her way and discovers that unmasking mistakes and vulnerabilities is one way of being strong.
... bloated, superfluous ... almost 300 pages long, with 17 essays across four sections — a length that wouldn’t be a problem if the book were not so repetitive ... On the one hand, Hauser’s voice as an essayist is eminently readable. She’s funny and conspiratorially conversational, though she does use the word 'fucking' as a modifier about a dozen too many times (we get it). But in choosing to focus The Crane Wife on the societal expectations of romance and dating that she has bought into, and the gradual realization that she can resist them, Hauser writes herself into a corner. The topics that she weaves in serve largely to distract from the fact that she rehashes the same epiphanies about the kinds of mistakes she has made in her dating life from essay to essay ... These lessons feel stale even before they are recycled, and the constant recurrence of the same structural formula makes the book even more tiresome ... for all that these pieces appear on their surface to be candid and confessional, Hauser does not actually reveal much about herself or even the relationships that drive The Crane Wife. The few essays that are about her childhood and her family do not dig deeply into how her upbringing shaped her concept of romance — an odd omission, given how much The Crane Wife revolves around where Hauser inherited ideas about love and relationships ... Yes, even memoirists have a right to privacy and to control how much they let readers in. But eliding basic context can, at times, feel as withholding as the belabored braiding that stalls the essays’ revelations ... Like other writers whose viral short pieces landed them hyped-up books with big advances that inevitably fell flat, Hauser has been ill-served by a publishing industry that seems most concerned with engineering best sellers. The Crane Wife the essay did not need to turn into The Crane Wife the memoir — it is a gratuitous expansion that tries to pull off the same trick over and over again, with hackneyed lessons about thinly sketched men.
The book brings that same frank, funny gaze to bear on a succession of other doomed romances, mining them for complicated truths about how the love stories we inherit, consume and tell come to shape our experience and expectations. Think of it as rehab for road-weary romantics ... As an author and creative writing professor, Hauser is hyper receptive to narrative, but she makes an enthralling case for the extent to which the irresistible urge to “storify” love – to seek drama and colour – can throw us all off-course ... Does a book so relentlessly focused on one person’s pursuit of intimacy feel claustrophobic at times? Inevitably, but ultimately these essays throw open the windows, inviting us to redefine what constitutes a love story ... Of course, books about single women invariably end with them being paired off. There’s no spoiler alert required to say that one of the most invigorating aspects of this tirelessly interrogative collection is that its author remains unpartnered to the very last page. As she and the reader both can appreciate, however, this doesn’t mean that her life is without love, and it certainly isn’t the same as being alone.
Hauser’s interrogation of these stories reveals as much about what it means to love someone else as it does about what it means to love a story, and ultimately, this interrogative act leads her inward, as she turns the force of her questioning toward herself and the unexpected shape of her own life story ... It’s Hauser’s anxieties about the shape of her life story that, in turn, give shape to the narrative arc of her memoir. Written in nonlinear prose, the book’s essays do not proceed chronologically but—perhaps true to form for a theatre-kid turned novelist—are arranged in a spiraling adaptation of the four-act structure ... As Hauser grapples with the changing shape of her life story, it’s fitting that the shape of each essay and, indeed, the shape of the collection itself, are self-consciously experimental in form ... In giving herself and her readers permission to own the shape of their stories, Hauser demonstrates the liberatory potential of disrupting conventional narrative patterns ... Reading The Crane Wife is a bit like following Hauser into the Mirror Maze, her voice as narrator guiding the way through and out. Whether writing about familial or cultural stories, each text becomes a mirror in which Hauser sees herself reflected back. And in her willingness to turn inward, to truly face herself, Hauser’s essays open outward, becoming themselves mirrors into which readers might gaze.
The weakness of many of the essays in The Crane Wife is that Hauser tends to elide the subjectivity of her experiences in favor of sweeping generalities that don’t quite ring true—particularly in statements about the way women are and how they act, and hence the form heterosexual relationships tend to take ... It’s not only that generalities such as this one aren’t really true to life, but that leaning on them can steer the essays in The Crane Wife away from more specific and interesting and, paradoxically, universal territory ... When 'that’s the way women are' takes the place of 'that’s the way I am,' the anecdotes can feel pat and under-examined ... The tendency to generalize is a shame because Hauser is excellent at capturing the weird, beautiful essence of life when she deals in the specifics. The Crane Wife is full of fascinating, vividly drawn characters ... At points, the language can be a little too swashbuckling for my tastes, but Hauser’s writing has a genuine warmth and kindness that is entertaining and engaging in equal measure ... The men Hauser gravitates towards dating in her thirties are not well drawn ... maybe that’s the thing about morals and stories: Even us women don’t all see the same one.
Staccato, funny, barbed, metaphor-laced, and thought-provoking ... No matter her focus, Hauser’s deductions about human nature are always arresting, delving, fresh, and exhilarating.
Although humorous and smart, at times this memoir requires time and patience on the part of readers ... Hauser has created a meandering but entertaining look into her professional and personal life. Readers looking for something a little different in a memoir will not be disappointed.
The 16 other pieces in Hauser's memoir-in-essays likewise explore love's many forms with frank, raw honesty, charting an artful path through one woman's experiences. Hauser often draws from both myth and the mundane as she seeks to understand her relationship to the world ... Hauser's wry, introspective investigation of her assumptions about love will likely free readers to examine their own personal narratives as well ... embraces this philosophy again and again as Hauser excavates her past loves and losses, thoughtfully examines them and declares the pain of love to be worth the risk.
In this perceptive and probing work, novelist Hauser brilliantly parses the myths that shaped her understanding of love ... While readers may root for a cathartic ending of self-actualization, Hauser shrewdly argues that, in real life, most years are spent painfully relearning the same lessons ... It all adds up to a thrillingly original deconstruction of desire and its many configurations.
These references – almost exclusively American – risk alienating unfamiliar readers, and many of the analogies require significant explanation ... Hauser’s writing is personal, honest and often amusing. However, if some books need to be written, others are books that the author needs to write, and The Crane Wife at times reads like an elaborate form of self-therapy. At its best, though, the collection is an invitation to live beyond the narrow confines of socially prescribed romantic relationships.
