The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays

In this perceptive and probing work, novelist Hauser (Family of Origin) brilliantly parses the myths that shaped her understanding of love. She glides into the nonfiction realm on the wings of the book’s title essay, which originally ran in the Paris Review in 2019, wherein an ornithological expedition helped Hauser to identify her own needs after a called-off engagement and years of self-abnegation. In the sparkling meditations that rise from it, Hauser gently unravels the “barometer[s]” of happiness that gave her epiphanic moment its power. In “Blood,” she juxtaposes the innocent makings of a 1990s middle school crush with a romantic relationship in 2008 that went a year too long thanks to Barack Obama, who “raised our expectations of what redemptive things were possible.” “Nights We Didn’t” reflects on the growing pains of Hauser’s queerness that “made me dangerous,” while another poignant essay reconciles her desire for motherhood with that of “sexual abandon.” 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. “If you are feeling unsatisfied that I am not tying these threads together for you,” she writes, “ask yourself: Who told you these things went together?” It all adds up to a thrillingly original deconstruction of desire and its many configurations. (July)