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So so damn good. Hilarious and accessible and relatable and beautiful. Fuck. Would reread every five years.

So so damn good. Hilarious and accessible and relatable and beautiful. Fuck. Would reread every five years.

Amazing! Best book of the year so far. She has a beautiful and funny and true writing style. Her stories are deeply personal and relatable too

A fantastic collections of essays featuring the "The Crane Wife". Hauser creates a series of "love stories" ranging from romantic love to familial love and the lessons learned in the process. These 20 stories portray a range of emotions and thoughts on love and life, both painful and hopeful. The Hepburn story truly resonated with me and I absolutely loved how achingly honest Hauser is in her writing.

I enjoyed this one. I didn‘t find the author very relatable (in life experiences or, in some cases, in philosophies of living), yet I liked the writing a lot. Hoping for many more great memoirs, essay collections, and mashups of the two in 2023.

The only thing worse than reading a story about someone on a journey to scatter ashes is to be an actual human person toting around the cremains of people you love. A person who is wrecked, who is grieving, who is angry, but who also now feels like a fucking cliché. As if there is something tired and redundant about her sadness, which is no less heavy for its being common.

On reading Rebecca:

At one point, Emily was in the bathtub with a Scotch and the novel and somehow still had enough hands to live-text US: THIS WOMAN'S ONLY PROBLEM IS THAT THE SERVANTS ARE MEAN TO HER AND I WANT THAT LIFE.

"The Crane Wife" is a story from Japanese folklore. ... there is a crane who tricks a man into thinking she is a woman so she can marry him. She loves him, but knows that he will not love her if she is a crane so she spends every night plucking out all of her feathers with her beak. She hopes 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.

Every pool of drinkable water matters. Every wolfberry dangling from a twig, in Texas, in January, matters. The difference between sustaining life and not having enough was that small.

If there were a kind of rehab for people ashamed to have needs, maybe this was it. You will go to the Gulf. You will count every wolfberry. You will measure the depth of each puddle.

The biologist running the trip rolled up in a large white van with a boat hitch and the words BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES sten- ciled across the side. Jeff was fortyish and wore sunglasses and a backwards baseball cap.... The first thing Jeff said was: "We'll head back to camp, but I hope you don't mind if we run by the liquor store first." I felt more optimistic about my suitability for science.

⭐️⭐️⭐️ Essays about the evolving and growing thoughts about love and relationships of a woman in her late 30s. Some warm and interesting essays, but also some that are just a lot longer than they needed to be. I saw Roxane Gay‘s review of it on Goodreads and she was like “girl, we get it, you broke up with a bunch of men” and that sums it up better than anything I can come up with.

I love a good memoir, and I love, love, LOVED this one! (Appropriate since most of the essays are about love: young love, disappointed love, queer love, familial love, friend love, changing love, self love, etc.). Told in essays that are distinct but also work to create a larger history of her love life. The writing is beautiful, funny, poignant, and well-crafted. ♥️♥️♥️
If you're not in the mood for love, this is probably not the book for you.

A complete delight, from start to finish. These essays are smartly conceived, brilliantly written, and always engaging and surprising. There‘s real beauty in their honesty and vulnerability. Oh, and they‘re funny as hell. I will be handselling this to the moon and back.

Forgive me, I‘m using the same image again — this time for the review. The Crane Wife is a “memoir in essays” which is a type of book I love. I did connect with the author and some of the stories. Some were a bit repetitive but I enjoyed her voice. I mostly listened to the audiobook read by Hauser. I‘d be interested to read others from her.

It‘s HOT 🥵
The only thing to do is read by the pool.

3.5/5

I read Hauser's essay The Crane Wife in 2019 and thought it was a beautiful, so I was excited to read more of her essays. They tell stories from her life through different lenses, such as the X Files and The Fantasticks. One of my favorites was The Second Mrs. de Winter which looked at a failed relationship through the lens of Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. It was slow, contemplative, and a little sad, but I enjoyed all the essays.

I got so close to a bingo in June, but didn't quite manage to finish The Crane Wife.

#bookspin #doublebookspin #bookspinbingo @TheAromaofBooks

Cap Joyce was a cowboy who ran an Arizona dude ranch called the Spur Cross because acting like a cowboy, for tourists, was more lucrative than the actual herding of cattle.... He was my great-grandfather.

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl