The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays

I put my shirt back on, because maybe everything just winds up terrible in the end and there’s no point at all and we couldn’t possibly fuck with all that tragedy watching over us, could we?

It is winter again as I write to you, and maybe it’s a good moment for embracing narratives that creep along less quickly than we’d like. My appreciation has grown for the slow and steady, for the small ever-present good, for the kind of love that is not easily tumbled by the elements, for the boring, even. These are the kind of stories and ways of

Most of all, this is a book about the ways each of us shape our lives, and our understanding of them, through stories. I respect that there are likely many quantum-entangled alternate and complementary and divergent versions of the stories I tell. As many different versions as there are people in the book, probably. And those stories are just as re

I think I was afraid that if I called off my wedding I was going to ruin myself. That doing it would disfigure the story of my life in some irredeemable way. I had experienced worse things than this, but none threatened my American understanding of a life as much as a called-off wedding did. What I understood on the other side of my decision, on th

There’s a passage from The Velveteen Rabbit which my sister asked me to read at her wedding. I thought I was up for the task—it’s a children’s book, for fuck’s sake—but when the time came, I cried all the way through: “Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time,

It is true that neither of us had any game. It is also true that this wasn’t the point. The point was that we both understood how easy it is to let your life pass along, totally in book, unless you take a risk, disrupt the expected patterns, and try to make something human happen.

The DRC robots are not the perfect heroes I’d hoped for, but I love them anyway. I love them specifically. I love them right now, without assuming they will someday be better at doing the things they’re meant to do. I love them for reminding me that when you are working toward a large good thing, it’s the small stuff that often feels impossible. Ju

Mulder is the one who makes things happen, and Scully is the one who gets things done (if you’re confused about the difference you should take a good hard look at yourself).

Both characters change along the way, and both characters absolutely need each other. And so, what Chris Carter taught me about love (Mr. Carter, please find, herewith, my therapy bills) is that the very best, and sexiest, and truest kind of boning there is, is the kind where two very different kinds of people find a mode of working together—of lov

“If he were in town instead of away” lives next door to honesty. It’s a laundry scoop on the kitchen counter.