CJ Hauser writes with a unique and authentic voice, drawing you into her personal memories and intimate snapshots of her life. The Crane Wife is reflective, self-aware and discursive in the best possible way.

CJ Hauser's voice is self-deprecating, intelligent, honest (or so one thinks!) and definitely worth reading, regardless of where you are in your human development (I confess I am well passed CJH's generation). Yet, despite that gap, I have enjoyed hugely this collection of snapshots and reflections on the vagaries of love and relationships, on becoming the self one actually is, based (we are told and I believe) on the author's own history and family.
The writing is excellent: vivid, reflective, humorous, never obvious, always beautifully surprising. The anecdotes which prompt each chapter range from the mundane to the bathetic, from the poignant to the hilarious, always keeping a sort of skepticism towards the narrator herself, which is ultimately the protagonist of most stories or has a close familiar connection with them. They are all interesting, with unusually striking images (the titular crane plucking her feathers, a peripatetic plastic bag of human ashes... which raise the impact of the biographical material to a far more universal plane. These explorations of self, anchored on matters of progeny and mortality, love and identity, are compelling and enlightening about being a woman, but also and what makes them particularly successful, really entertaining (fun!) to read. They provide excellent material for discussion and pondering and not only at a bookclub!! - their ethical quality won me.

‘There are ways to be wounded and ways to survive those wounds, but no one can survive denying their own needs. To be a crane-wife is unsustainable.’

Firstly, I cannot tell you how much I loved this book. It’s not often that I read non-fiction, and it’s less frequent that I’m moved to tears by it, but back in 2019 when I first read CJ Hauser’s long read essay, The Crane Wife, in The Paris Review (linked in my current reads highlight!) that’s exactly what happened.

Here was a woman, only a few years older than I was, who perfectly articulated the pain and grief that comes with a significant break up, and the grace and courage it takes to realise you need, and deserve, more than what you’re getting.

This memoir, which includes her original The Crane Wife essay, is out on July 14th and is a beautiful masterpiece of elegant and observant prose. Equal parts laugh out loud funny and emotionally raw, this collection of essays speaks to Hauser’s own experiences through an overarching theme of love, covering family (both found and biological), sex, relationships, love, loss, friendship and the glorious chaos that comes with it all. I couldn’t put it down.

Thank you to Netgalley and @penguinrandomhouse for the ARC.

Although took me time to get used to this style of writing I loved the short essays and one which you can dip in and out. One to be definitely recommended.

I loved this collection of essays. They were a joy to read and I found them funny and moving at the same time. It was great to be able to read these alongside other books as I could pick it up and read one now and then.

An unusual take on the essay format. From calling off a wedding to say whooping cranes, to scattering ashes and the two graves of John Bulushi. There isn't an overall línk thoughout the collection, it appears to be a random selection of essays but the craftsmanship of a wordsmith is clearly evident. Not to everyone's taste but worth a look if you have been the one to walk away from a.long term relationship.

This collection of essays didn’t grab me at the beginning, the vignettes were short and a bit random. I’m glad I read on as I enjoyed the memoir style essays very much. You could say she was a bit of an ‘over thinker’ in her loves and losses but it was such an honest account. I particularly liked when she compared herself with characters in books, Rebecca, and films and television, but wasn’t familiar with all the references. This didn’t detract from the book too much for me. An insightful read.

I loved this book. At first I wasn't sure the essay format was for me so I started again. It most definitely was for me. Clever wording, witty writing, life lessons. A book where you end up better informed about your own life by the time you reach the end.

The Crane Wife starts brilliantly. For me it then kind of lost its way. I persevered but eventually at the 50% point, I decided to abandon the book. I can't explain why this book just didn't work for me. It is candid and raw and comes across as authentic enough. I just could not connect enough to want to read any further, let alone finish it. It kind of lacked coherence causing me to lose interest. There is an excellent dissection of a movie (The Philadelphia Story) and some smart Scully/Mulder analysis but overall just not enough coherence to sustain my engagement.

Thankyou for giving me the chance to review in advance. Borrowed this morning and finished this afternoon. Not my usual style but the essayist / memoir style now appeals to me. Would recommend.

The Crane Wife was one of those essays that I kept coming back to over the summer of 2019 - I had it bookmarked on my browser for weeks. So when I saw Hauser was releasing a compilation book, I swooped to get my hands on a copy.

There are a few essays that live up to the elegant masterpiece that is the title piece - I found Hauser's musing on friendship and familial love particularly poignant. There's a fair amount of repetition, and it sometimes feels like Hauser is not entirely clear-eyed in her constant battle between self-justification and self-flagellation, but there is something appealing about her honesty and wry humour.

It may be best read in pieces, but The Crane Wife is a powerful collection of essays on the variegated nature of love.

When life - and love - doesn't turn out as planned...

Finding honesty in living, through this series of essays

REVIEW: The Crane Wife by CJ Hauser

A collection of essays that work as a memoir. Including twenty essays, Hauser details her personal stories, her loves and loses and how sometimes we do not have one long-standing love story.

I like essay collections, especially by women. This was a good read for my commute. Some of these essays are really short, that meant I didn’t feel like I got much out of them, and others felt way too long.

A few of these essays focused on entertainment that the author liked and consumed, with a whole essay on the film ‘The PS’. I have never watched this film and the essay was very long, so I found this a little tedious to read.

I found her essays on her relationships and breakups to be the most interesting and engaging part of this book.

Overall, an interesting essay collection but it didn’t fully work for me.

This is a rich and crystalline read of warmth and pain, sunshine and dust. CJ Hauser awakes all those feelings you know, but don’t have words, let alone stories, for.
She is restlessly smart and can’t resist turning each granular moment into a poetic introspective anecdote. These are often fragments. to make a memoir, she shuffles them together. You smile and cry. You suspect, as she says of her grandmother’s stories, “Goddamn, (…) none but half of those are true.”
The collection starts at a brisk pace with brief absurdist parables, telling of love and memory. Then the parables end, and details congeal into longer accounts. Often culture shimmers as it touches her, becoming a mirror that reflects a person faced with dilemmas, of love, commitment, and fulfilment. Her fictions wander off in many directions, anecdotes leading to larger landscapes from where you can look off towards the far horizon.
She brings all her scraps together, shuffled into untidy piles. And that’s what life is, something you can joke about but never sort into a definitive order, never make into serious piles. My favourite was the woman who wears clashing colours because they will appear to be the colours that are “really in right now” to her husband, who is colour-blind.
Hauser reminded me of people I text who I know must be allowed to send the last message, or those messages will go back and forth to infinity. Often, this edging beyond, adding another and another last word, has a magical and moving effect, at least if, as here, it is executed with precision literary acumen. Hauser is pushy. She always threatens to push things too far, like a chocolatier surprising you with layers of deliciousness, one after another. You yearn for more and feel a bit sickly at the same time.
As you read, you remember your own happysad elegentclumsy times, if you succeeded or fell flat. And you become aware that you don’t know now any more than you did then—about life and love.

I'm a recent convert to women essayists, partly as they're perfect commute reading. In the case of Hauser, I like her wry, observational style but I felt this collection tries to hang together in a way that doesn't quite work. The beginning, especially, seems to aspire to a sort of memoir/autobiography via fragmented family stories, but the shortness of the pieces and fast switches between Hauser and her ancestors felt jittery and too piecemeal.

In contrast, some of the longer pieces such as the 'reading' of The Philadelphia Story starts off well but goes on too long and so becomes repetitive - something that I'm afraid I feel about this collection as a whole. Even reading a couple of pieces while travelling, this didn't have the variation and diversity that might have had more interest for me.

Of course, it's always interesting to get the inside view on someone else's thoughts about love, dating, relationships but the theme of women not speaking up and settling for far less than they need or desire becomes too cyclical and a bit monotonous, however true and important the point is.

So perhaps what I'm saying is that as individual pieces these essays work better than as a collection - they're the sort of essays I'd read in magazines like Stylist or Grazia, with breaks of a week between pieces. Reading them too close together doesn't do them any favours: 3.5 stars.

3.5 rounded down

Unlike many, this was my first experience of the author's writing (her essay link: The Crane Wife has attracted over a million reads), so I went in pretty blind.

I loved the overarching theme of love, be it familial or romantic, and there were a few standout essays for sure: my favourite was the one where the author took her grandmother's remains to be scattered at Martha's Vineyard which is also where John Belushi is buried. It's a little difficult to describe the essay - and comparing one's grandmothers life to that of an actor who met an untimely death from a drug overdose doesn't sound like it should work - but it was very well done. "Siberian Watermelon" was another good one, about Hauser's gardening attempts and how it brought her closer to her father during the pandemic. A few others didn't quite hit the mark for me (the one on Katharine Hepburn, for example) but that comes down to personal taste/preference.

The Crane Wife by CJ Hauser is a memoir in essay form about love and relationships and family, books and film and TV, nature and life.