Review: 'The Crane Wife,' by C.J. Hauser

In her first book of nonfiction, a collection of 17 essays accompanying the popular title piece, "The Crane Wife," novelist C.J. Hauser takes the reader along on a soulful journey of self-discovery as she brings together smart, astute observations on modern love and life.

Hauser's work has appeared in Tin House, the Kenyon Review and the New York Times. Her most recent novel, "Family of Origin," was published in 2019.

The title essay, published in the Paris Review in 2019, reached more than a million readers worldwide and went viral on the internet.

The piece focuses on the fallout from Hauser's breakup with her fiancé, who had been unfaithful and unavailable to her emotionally. She's both heartbroken and unhappy with herself for sticking with him as long as she did — a double whammy.

As she works through her complex emotions, she reads a Japanese folk story about a crane who tricks a man into thinking she is a woman so she can marry him. She knows he won't love her if she's a crane, so every night she plucks her feathers out with her beak, hoping he won't see that she's a bird — a creature with creature needs.

This kind of "self-erasing" resonates with Hauser, who at the time was under the sway of a common belief that to need things from other people makes you weak. "I think this is true for lots of people," she writes, "but I think it's especially true for women." In a stoic frame of mind, she had subjugated her needs, convincing herself that she didn't need the traditional trappings of love. She didn't need monogamy.

Clarity sometimes comes from unexpected places. While on a research expedition on the Gulf Coast with a group of scientists studying the food sources that cranes need to survive, she realizes, "There are ways to be wounded and ways to survive those wounds but no one can survive denying their own needs."

The essays in this volume offer a fascinating blend of relationships and breakups, colorful family stories, and cultural and literary influences. In fluid prose, she pursues more fulfilling ways to find happiness.

In "The Lady and the Lamp," Hauser brings together her account of a robotics challenge that tests robots programmed to perform jobs too dangerous for humans­ — "robot-saviors" — with thoughts on Florence Nightingale and her own habit of dating difficult men and trying to fix them. "For years, I convinced myself that to love is meant to be an act of extreme and transformative caregiving," she writes. "And so I've become more savior than partner. More robot than girl."

"The Two-Thousand Pound Bee," a meditation on grief, conflates Hauser's trip to Martha's Vineyard to scatter her grandmother's ashes with John Belushi's comedic genius and the strange circumstances of his burial.

"Siberian Watermelon" captures a tender father/daughter relationship in the guise of gardening.

What a pleasure it is be in the company of this writer. With clear eyes and an open heart, she finds her way and discovers that unmasking mistakes and vulnerabilities is one way of being strong.

Elfrieda Abbe is a critic in Wisconsin.

The Crane Wife

By: C.J. Hauser.

Publisher: Doubleday, 296 pages, $28.