A memoir in essays that expands on the viral sensation “The Crane Wife” with a frank and funny look at love, intimacy and self in the 21st century. From friends and lovers to blood family and chosen family, this “elegant masterpiece” (Roxane Gay, the New York Times bestselling author of HUNGER) asks what more expansive definitions of love might offer ​us all.

Ten days after calling off their wedding, CJ Hauser went on an expedition to Texas to study the whooping crane. After a week wading through the gulf, they realized they'd almost signed up to live someone else's life.

Hauser releases themself from traditional narratives of happiness and goes looking for ways of living that leave room for the unexpected, making plenty of mistakes along the way. They kiss Internet strangers and officiate at a wedding. They reread REBECCA in the house their boyfriend once shared with his ex-wife and rewinds Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story to learn how not to lose yourself in a relationship. They think about Florence Nightingale at a robot convention and grief at John Belushi’s rock and roll gravesite, and the difference between those stories we’re asked to hold versus those we choose to carry.

Told with the late-night barstool directness of your wisest, most bighearted friend, THE CRANE WIFE is a book for everyone whose life doesn't look the way they thought it would; for everyone learning to find joy in the not-knowing; for everyone trying, if sometimes failing, to build a new sort of life story, a new sort of family, a new sort of home, to live in.