The Stories We Tell About Ourselves: On CJ Hauser’s “The Crane Wife”
CJ Hauser | The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays | Doubleday | 2022 | 336 Pages
In her memoir-in-essays The Crane Wife, fiction-writer-turned-essayist CJ Hauser searches for answers. “I want to learn from what went wrong in the past but sometimes it seems everything worth knowing has been redacted,” she writes, “As if ignorance is the only thing that allowed each successive generation to tumble into love, however briefly, and spawn the next.”
Hauser teaches creative writing at Colgate University and is the author of two novels. The From-Always, published in 2014, follows two women who meet when their lives are in flux. In 2019’s Family of Origin, tragedy reconnects estranged siblings. In The Crane Wife, she excavates the love stories that made her being possible—her great-grandmother sticking by her drunken cowboy husband’s side, her father smashing open a geode for her mother—but her primary site of excavation is her own thwarted romances which she mines for understanding. Despite the presence of romantic loves in nearly every piece, Hauser sketches them out as shadowy figures as opposed to creating character studies. The energy of the collection is in self-discovery, not in the relationships themselves.
“There is nothing more humiliating to me than my own desires,” she writes in The Crane Wife’s titular essay—the one that went viral in the summer of 2019. “Nothing makes me hate myself more than being burdensome and less than self-sufficient. I did not want to feel like the kind of nagging woman who might exist in a sit-com.” In Japanese folklore, Hauser explains, a crane plucks out her feathers every night to convince the man she loves that she is a human woman with the hope that “he will not see what she really is: a bird who must be cared for, a bird capable of flight, a creature, with creature needs.” There are multiple versions of The Crane Wife in Japanese folklore, but most end with the husband discovering the truth and the crane having to transform back into her true form and leave. Her habitual sacrifice must remain hidden for the marriage to work.
Hauser interrogates the gendered implications of wanting more from another person. A man’s desire is “passionate;” a woman’s is “needy.” Calling off her wedding, she had worried,“would disfigure the story of my life in some irredeemable way.” So what does that disfigurement look like, and does she need to be redeemed, anyway? What is wrong with leaving a story that you know you don’t belong in? Even as she writes about walking away, she expresses shame for writing about her own broken heart instead of famines or endangered species. The life she’s built would be “unstitched and repurposed,” so who is she really, and what will her story actually look like?
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In “Hepburn qua Hepburn,” Hauser recounts her evolving relationship with The Philadelphia Story, a film where Katherine Hepburn’s Tracy Lord must choose between three suitors who “pitch Tracy versions of her future by pitching her versions of herself.” The simple way she loved it has changed since she identified with being able to choose who she was by choosing who she dated. “To conflate the choice of a romantic partner with the choice of one’s identity may strike you as retrograde, but as a thirteen-year-old girl trying on various identities of my own, it made total sense,” she writes. She can’t guarantee that the way a partner sees her won’t become how she sees herself. “I am porous to the world, a kind of joyful sponge for the affectations and interests of the people I love,” she writes, “It has been the work of my life to build slightly firmer boundaries around myself so that I can figure out where I end and the people I love begin.” To be a woman who dates men is to incessantly yield to their taste, to allow their interests to overtake your own, Hauser fears.
In “The Two Thousand Pound Bee,” Hauser confesses that she had always believed that her life would look like the lives of women in her family who came before her. “I am no longer young and the story of my life so far doesn’t resemble anything like the lives they lived,” she writes. There will be no photographs of her “triumphantly young and pregnant by the sea,” living “the kind of life [she doesn’t] even really want anymore, except for out of habit.” Hauser uses the word “mourning” to describe her process of accepting this lost path. Had she slipped into the life she’d envisioned with her former fiancé, one with a husband and children in the big house they bought in upstate New York, she could have become the mouse with the broom and dustpan. But she didn’t. Still, walking away isn’t as easy as toggling a switch.
“Hepburn Qua Heburn,” establishes the theme of women being told who they are by other people that weaves throughout the collection. When her mother-in-law-to-be quilts Beatrix Potter character-themed stockings for the family, she makes Hauser a stocking adorned with the broom and dustpan-holding mouse Hunca Munca despite her request for the adventurous Squirrel Nutkin. “When I looked at that mouse with her broom,” she writes, “I wondered: which one of us was wrong about who I was?”
Hauser plays a game with herself called “time travel” where she mentally revisits moments where she caused hurt and undoes what she did. Fifteen years later, she still revisits the time before she openly identified as queer where she fell for a girl named Maggie while dating a boy. She dumps him to covertly see Maggie, then dumps Maggie to mitigate the boy’s hurt, and “on a day so full of possibilities of mid-Atlantic spring that we both got sunburned,” Hauser obliges his request to get back together “as if this would make me less culpable of every mistake I’d managed to make with both of them.” But beneath the pulse of pain she feels when remembering this lies a suffering caused not by the hurt she caused others but the pleasure that she denied herself. “The story of what happened with Maggie was in so many ways the story of what didn’t happen with Maggie,” Hauser writes. Her undergraduate self couldn’t give Maggie a fair, public chance. She’d let her fear sit in the driver’s seat. But as an adult, when her queer friends tell stories about all the girls they didn’t kiss out of fear, one offers up a charitable reading of their almosts. “These are stories too,” Hauser writes, “These nights you didn’t. You’re allowed to call them beginnings.”
“You are unhappy but don’t know why yet so you are letting the momentum of the life choices you’ve made carry you along, reassuringly enough,” Hauser writes to herself in “Act Three: Dulcinea Quits.” Her high school love calls her for more than comfort after his Narcotics Anonymous sponsor, who decided the ex could re enter his relationship with Hauser after becoming sober, passes away. These two men had made Hauser, who was at that point engaged to be married (albeit, unhappily), the light at the end of a sobriety journey. “And then he describes you. The person he’s been fighting to get better for,” she writes, “And of course she’s not you…It’s you at seventeen…He is describing his Dulcinea, but you are Aldonza.” This man has mistaken Hauser, flesh and blood and bone, for a fantasy who doesn't exist. Toward the essay’s end, she reminds readers that neither Don Quixote nor Aldonza nor Dulcinea even exist in the world of Man of La Mancha: “The whole show is a spectacle being put on by Peter O’Toole’s Cervantes, slipping on a fake beard, and trying to distract himself and his fellow prisoners from the reality of their own choices.” The role that people expect a person to fill isn’t always the role that they end up filling, and what’s expected from people, how we are seen, isn’t under our control. In the end, all of it is artifice.
I saw myself in the collection enough times that it felt eerie. But are there people who are fully content with the choices they’ve made? People whose lives end up playing out just as they imagined; alternate options interest them zero percent? How do you know with any degree of certainty if you’ve chosen the right door? Sometimes, do you feel like everything you are is just a reaction to other people’s perceptions of you, working to either find or hide the truth? Sitting in the coffee shop where I come to write two or three days a week right now, I’m acutely aware of how others might judge my actions. I try to hold my face like a woman who is focused and dignified, but this probably makes me look unfriendly. Other customers banter easily with the baristas, but I can’t bring myself to do more than ask how they are, thank them, and tip $1 because when I barista-ed, I resented serving people my age who probably never had to wear a oat milk-splattered apron, so I imagine the people in front of me do, too. Here I am, mapping my former miserable self onto them, worrying that they’re projecting the figure of the aloof, privileged customer onto me. It’s exhausting.
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There’s no way to know if you’re making the right choice or if the right choice even exists. And even making the choices that you believe are best doesn’t absolve you from pursuing the what-ifs. In many ways, your life is better than you could have envisioned when you were young. Your apartment is nice, but not amazing. You’re not struggling nor are you wealthy. Sometimes you regret not working harder. Other times, you regret not making more irresponsible choices. If traditionality is suffocating, living free is like treading water and trying not to sink. Isn’t all of it like treading water sometimes? Is it possible to ever truly be at peace with one’s choices? When do the roads not taken stop taunting you?
If the first three sections of this collection trace Hauser’s journey analyzing her past, understanding her decisions, and considering other lives, the final section deals with making peace with all of it. Physical structures embody more than they let on. Shirley Jackson wrote ghost stories where the house personified how “the structure of your life” can “feel menacing.”
Hauser buys her former fiancé out of their mortgage and occupies the three-bedroom space alone. She writes, “The feeling persisted that I was living the wrong kind of life for a house like mine, and I was not the only one who felt that way.” Voices from the outside exacerbate her feeling of wrongness. She has an idea of how the expectations of the place are failing her, and it’s being echoed by those who see where she lives—a single, childless woman taking up more space than she deserves to. However, the remedy for this is to actualize her childhood dream of living in a home overflowing with “an infinite collective of friends and animals.” This former fantasy was the one she created before she was force-fed the script of what she should want and who she should become. “What stories were you told, and not told, about the shape of love, the shape of yourself, the shape of a happy life?” she asks. Our relationships (romantic, platonic, familial) shape us, but we have the final say in what path we choose. She searches for acceptance—not from the world, but from herself.