That’s what makes this book both universal and exciting. It’s about the breaking of habits, about consciously developing agency over one’s own fate, and about the relief, wonder and even joy that might follow that grief.

The grief essay is, or perhaps ought to be, a genre unto itself. Getting it right appears to involve an alchemy that braids personal loss with metaphorical — and often quotidian — parallels, all in gorgeous prose. Bonus points for leavening the pain with a bit humor. Hauser’s story of calling off her marriage to her cheating, gaslighting fiance, then finding grace while studying the whooping crane off the Gulf Coast of Texas, hit all of these notes.

17 brilliant pieces.

Hauser takes the reader along on a soulful journey of self-discovery as she brings together smart, astute observations on modern love and life.

... bloated, superfluous.

The book brings that same frank, funny gaze to bear on a succession of other doomed romances, mining them for complicated truths about how the love stories we inherit, consume and tell come to shape our experience and expectations. Think of it as rehab for road-weary romantics.

Hauser’s interrogation of these stories reveals as much about what it means to love someone else as it does about what it means to love a story, and ultimately, this interrogative act leads her inward, as she turns the force of her questioning toward herself and the unexpected shape of her own life story.

The weakness of many of the essays in The Crane Wife is that Hauser tends to elide the subjectivity of her experiences in favor of sweeping generalities that don’t quite ring true—particularly in statements about the way women are and how they act, and hence the form heterosexual relationships tend to take.

Perceptive and witty.

Staccato, funny, barbed, metaphor-laced, and thought-provoking.

Although humorous and smart, at times this memoir requires time and patience on the part of readers.

The 16 other pieces in Hauser's memoir-in-essays likewise explore love's many forms with frank, raw honesty, charting an artful path through one woman's experiences. Hauser often draws from both myth and the mundane as she seeks to understand her relationship to the world.

In this perceptive and probing work, novelist Hauser brilliantly parses the myths that shaped her understanding of love.

Lively, thoughtful, and often funny.

These references – almost exclusively American – risk alienating unfamiliar readers, and many of the analogies require significant explanation.