C.J. Hauser in conversation with Snowden Wright for The Crane Wife: A Memoir – Monday, July 18th at 6 pm at Off Square Books
UPDATE: CJ is collaborating with tattoo artist Kalatu to design a bandana in honor of The Crane Wife. These bandanas will be available to attendees who bring proof of donation to The International Crane Foundation.
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
About the Book
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.
About the Author
CJ Hauser teaches creative writing at Colgate University. She is the author of two novels, Family of Origin and The From-Aways. In 2019 she published “The Crane Wife” in The Paris Review, which reached more than a million readers all over the world. This is her first work of nonfiction.
About the Host
Snowden Wright is the author of the novels American Pop and Play Pretty Blues. He has written for The Atlantic, Salon, Esquire, and the New York Daily News, among other publications. Wright lives in Yazoo County, Mississippi, where he is at work on his third novel, forthcoming from HarperCollins.
The Crane Wife: A Memoir
$28.00
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN: 9780385547079
