The internet is the worst. But, approximately three years ago – just for a bit – it was the best. Why? Because everyone was reading “The Crane Wife”. Then telling their friends to read “The Crane Wife”. Then… talking about “The Crane Wife”. New York novelist CJ Hauser’s elegant, bittersweet essay about why she cancelled her wedding was published by The Paris Review in July 2019 and promptly went viral. It was read by more than a million people, and won high-profile admirers from writer Roxane Gay to actor Busy Philipps (who simply tweeted “Yes. Yes. YES.”) Amid the fervour, Hauser enjoyed one tweet in particular: “Forget your zodiac sign, tell me which passages of ‘The Crane Wife’ you immediately screenshotted to show your therapist.”
The internet doesn’t usually spin out over artful literary essays. So what was going on? Well, to use online parlance: people felt seen. Women, in particular. In “The Crane Wife”, Hauser treks off to study the North American whooping crane as research for her novel, Family of Origin. She does this 10 days after calling off her engagement. In the field, she discovers a Japanese folklore tale about a crane who plucks out her own feathers every night to maintain the illusion, for a man who otherwise wouldn’t want to care for her, that she’s a woman. “To keep becoming a woman is such self-erasing work. She never sleeps. She plucks out all her feathers, one by one,” wrote Hauser.
Self-erasure: it felt familiar. Through this ancient tale, Hauser found a metaphor for the way she’d had to squash down her desires until she almost vanished. She used to ask her fiancé how she could be sure of his love; he reminded her he’d said “I love you” once or twice before. “Why couldn’t I just know that he did, in perpetuity?” she wrote. Her needs were “a personal failing”; she “learnt… to survive on less”. What she was describing seemed pervasive, but mundane. But – not to be dramatic – it was actually pretty high stakes. It was, after all, about the destruction or survival of the soul.
Hauser had grown up in Connecticut, a place she characterises as being about “proper manners, politeness, don’t air your dirty laundry, social niceties above all, secrets stay on the inside”. It planted in her a rebel instinct to do the opposite. The essay exploded, she believes, because she had said, out loud, something that so many people had felt. “It felt pretty good to me, to be like: oh yeah, I can say more things out loud. I love to say things out loud!”
Remarkably, it was only ever meant to be a piece of promo – a piece written to plug Family of Origin. Going viral was “delightful, confusing, terrifying”. She wasn’t in a rush to write any more non-fiction. In fact, when her publishers suggested she follow up with a whole book of it, she resisted. She was stubborn. “I’m a novelist!” she cried. She didn’t want to write something just because the internet said so. Her publishers, gently, encouraged her to try it out. Reluctantly, she did. “It was like a new puzzle. It was like… I have all these fiction tools, and I can build new things. And I just started nerding out about it, and sooner rather than later I was like” – her tone switches, faux-hangdog teenager – “‘… all of you were right’.”
The Crane Wife – the book – is brilliantly idiosyncratic. It’s funny, beautiful and strange, full of seemingly random collections of cultural references and stories from Hauser’s past – things that seem like they won’t make sense together, until they do. The collection, written in Hauser’s very immediate voice, traverses broad subject matter, including family, break-ups, fertility and home ownership. She uses Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca as a template for unpicking our cultural obsession with the purity of first love. She writes about the comedian John Belushi’s grave becoming a site of pilgrimage, and whether her niece is the reincarnation of writer Shirley Jackson.
But who is CJ Hauser, this initialled enigma who saw into all of our souls? (Her full name is Christina Joyce, but everyone calls her CJ.) She lives between Syracuse, where she teaches creative writing at Colgate University (post-pandemic, a lot of her students are writing about purgatory), and Brooklyn. “I have determined that I am an amphibian,” she says, shyly, a little proud. That is, she’s bisexual, she writes in multiple genres, and lives in the country and the city. “And a Libra,” she adds, with a knowing chuckle. So, indecisive? “Yes,” in a pretend world-weary voice.
She’s also incredibly chirpy, despite arriving in the UK only a few hours earlier. As we talk outside Tate Britain, her voice is full of a lilt that might tilt over into laughter at any point. She has a story for everything. (When I ask if she’s worried “The Crane Wife” will become her “Wonderwall”, she tells me how her roommate used to bang on her wall when she was learning it on guitar: “You’re MY wonderwall! Stop playing that f***ing song!”) It’s hard to square her easy-breezy conversation with the emotional intensity she describes in other parts of her life. Her reaction to break-ups, for example, is apparently, “I’m gonna have 40 dogs in a cabin in the woods! And never see anyone again!” Oh, and she isn’t wearing dungarees – or overalls, as she calls them – and can’t believe that I am. Her mum told her not to pack any as we Brits wouldn’t have it.
It’s intriguing to meet the real person behind a viral sensation. The world is unashamedly nosy; “CJ Hauser ex-fiancé” is a frequent search term. Doesn’t that make her feel a bit weird? “Yes. Very. I don’t know what to make of that. Except for that… Oh, I don’t know.” It’s the only time in our conversation that Hauser’s sunny disposition dims. She writes about other exes in the book, too, and, “I only wanted to write about them in service of telling stories about myself and things I learned. And I hope that whenever there was a choice to leave something out that would hurt someone, I took it. And that whenever there was a chance for me to be the butt of the joke, I took it. Yeah. So that’s how I sleep at night. But I do worry. I live in horror of hurting anyone ever. But I also feel like I can’t not tell the story of my own life, just because other people were in it. Other people are always in it.”
Has her ex-fiancé read “The Crane Wife”? “Uhhhh… I think he did. Yep.” There is discomfort. It becomes apparent that this isn’t a writer joyriding through her life, scooping bits up with copy-hungry eyes. It weighs on her. “Oh, yeah! I am a worrier. A lot of feels in here. At all times.” Those who are in the book and are still in her life, though, gave their permission “a thousand times over”.
It’s a very in-your-thirties book. The essays luxuriate in working stuff out, learning to go a bit slower, not panicking in the face of uncertainty, and forgiving your younger, sillier self. “I couldn’t have written this book in my twenties. Even though some of the things that are in it happened long in the past. Because I just had a very different attitude toward… I don’t know, being wrong? Now I’m, like, all about that. It’s all part of the texture and the learning and the living.” Throughout her twenties she asked herself whether she was on track or off track, and nothing in between. Getting engaged seemed important, because “I think that was the moment where I was like, yeah, I’m gonna do the thing. Because that makes your happiness legible to other people, and it makes it legible to yourself.” Calling it off brought the twin fear that she was “f***ing this up”.
I really bristle at being limited by gender
I’m conscious of something: everyone kept telling Hauser how relatable “The Crane Wife” was. I’ve been doing it too, insufferably quoting passages from her own book at her. “Relatable” is a word that the publishing world seems obsessed by, specifically in relation to work by women. Is it useful? Hauser was firm about not having the word “women” used to market the book.
“I’ve had really amazing conversations about the sorts of issues and things I’m talking about in the book with trans friends, with men.” In fact, one male friend even had his therapist quote “The Crane Wife” at him in a session. He relayed the exchange to her: “Don’t f***ing quote CJ at me! If I wanted CJ’s advice, I’d call her! And maybe I will! But don’t quote it at me!”
“I do think that, if it’s relatable, I hope it’s relatable in a way that’s not limited by gender,” she tells me. “I really bristle at being limited by gender – anything that makes me feel like I’ve been shoved in a ruffly dress and I’m five again. I’m really grateful my book hasn’t been positioned in that way. Do men have to be relatable? Maybe not. Maybe men just have to be interesting, and women have to be relatable,” she says.
In her essay “The Lady with the Lamp”, having identified an impulse to care for others over herself, Hauser ponders: “What did it feel like to be me? I had no idea.” Has she got any closer to an answer? “I think I’m starting…?” she says. There’s still a question in her voice, the sense that it’s an idea to which she’s still adjusting. Along the way, she’s turned self-discovery into art again. But not an essay this time. She shows me a new tattoo on her arm. It’s funny, beautiful, strange – Hauser-ish, we might even call it – and depicts a bat with two bouquets of flowers. “One is for him to keep, and one is for him to give. So that’s sort of where I’m at right now.”
The Crane Wife is published on 14 July by Viking
