THE CRANE WIFE

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.