The crane wife : a memoir in essays /

Novelist Hauser (Family of Origin, 2019) drops the veil of fiction to tell true tales of family and her own evolution in this staccato, funny, barbed, metaphor-laced, and thought-provoking memoir-in-essays. She brings forth a murderous great-grandfather and an accomplished radio and news executive grandfather, recounts her struggles with the full spectrum of her sexuality and her feelings about her body, tells hilarious tales of her fascination with robots and her online-dating misadventures, investigates visions of the ideal home, and dissects the heart-wrenching demise of an engagement (in the title essay hooked to her participation in a whooping-crane field study) and other close relationships. A threshing critic, Hauser shares her changing perceptions of her favorite movie since age 13, The Philadelphia Story; reveals the depth of her obsession with The X-Files, and takes us down the old Yellow Brick Road on a journey through L. Frank Baum's Oz books, racism, the American Dream, wizardry, and the concealing of "inconvenient truths." No matter her focus, Hauser's deductions about human nature are always arresting, delving, fresh, and exhilarating.

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" 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)

Hauser (Family of Origin) enchants with a gorgeous short essay memoir about love in many forms. Hauser builds off her viral success of the titular story of canceled wedding plans turned bird-watching expedition. Each narrative is so rich with detail and emotional honesty that listeners will surely be enchanted by Hauser's take on life's many messes. Ever the English teacher, Hauser uses literary and cultural texts as a talisman for her personal relationships. Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story explores self-actualization, the book Rebecca becomes an examination of her current lover's relationship with his ex-wife, Shirley Jones's old house becomes a meditation on her sister's new motherhood, and John Belushi's death is a connection to her late grandmother. Hauser is as charming as she is sensitive, so each story requires listeners to take care and not overdose on emotional rawness. Hauser delivers her sharp sentences delicately with brushes of sardonic wit. The audio is edited without many pauses, so each chapter flows into the other at an uninterrupted pace. VERDICT Nothing short of a marvel, Hauser's writing, combined with stellar narration, creates an exceptional audio experience.--Lizzie Nolan

A novelist examines her troubled romantic relationships through a cultural lens. "I am a kind of breakup pro," Hauser writes late in this lively, thoughtful, and often funny set of personal essays--at a point when the reader has learned much about how unlucky in love she's been. For the author, exes aren't so much opportunities to disclose intimacies (though she does) or criticize clichéd relationship roles (that too), but to better understand herself and her decisions. In the potent title essay, which went viral when it was published online in 2019, the author describes calling off her wedding, going on a nature research trip, and reckoning with her ex's infidelities and how easily she endured them. There and throughout the book, Hauser is working through how cultural norms metamorphize and oversimplify messy emotions. She often does this by bouncing her experiences off books, TV, and movies: She finds echoes of her own life in The Philadelphia Story, Daphne du Maurier's classic gothic romance novel, Rebecca, and The X-Files, "a show about how a person can become disoriented in their relationship to the truth." Hauser's choices in metaphors for busted relationships sometimes feel strained, as if she's determined to make everything grist for the confessional mill--e.g., a trip to John Belushi's gravesite or attending an exhibition of first-responder robots. However, even when she overreaches, she makes a welcome effort to talk about both love and culture in unconventional ways. That approach is strongest and most effective in "Uncoupling," an essay about her uncertainty about pursuing breast-reduction surgery and about how much of her identity, for better and for worse, has been connected to ideas about woman and motherhood. It's candid, funny, and revealing of how much of our sense of self is woven around our (mis)conceptions about our bodies. A smart, inviting, and candid clutch of self-assessments. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.