The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays

the neckerchief compounded how stupid and lacking in dignity you felt and you vowed to never again wear any article of clothing that you could not survive the mortification of being dumped in. This has proved to be a good rule.

VI | ALL CACTI ARE SUCCULENTS BUT NOT ALL SUCCULENTS ARE CACTI, 1994 My parents go on vacation to Arizona. They bring back souvenir cacti for my sister, Leslie, and me. Little furry stumps, potted in gravel. Within a month, both our cacti are dead. My sister’s cactus is desiccated and shrunken. Dead of thirst. Mine is slumped over, rotten through.

Instead I find two flat, square stones in the ground. A husband and wife. The dates imply that she was buried here in 2014 but he is still alive, seventy-seven years old. Beneath her name it says: PLEASE WATER THE PLANTS. Beneath his it says: YES, DEAR.

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 am porous to the world, a kind of joyful sponge for the affectations and interests of the people I love. It has been the work of my life to build slightly firmer boundaries around myself so that I can figure out where I end and the people I love begin.

How do we talk about the loss of a thing for which there is no word? The lack of a word implies that it was never anything. It was never real. But here I am in my kitchen and the height of a child is marked on the doorframe. Here I am in my living room and I am still finding Nerf darts behind the couch. There it is, evidence of my love. My pain. I

But it was undercover-earnest, too. It was sweet and it was dumb and I could not have loved that blanket more.

I felt like maybe it was possible to have drawn your perfect house, all the rooms and animals and friends, and when there was no more room, to take out a second sheet of paper. To draw a tunnel, linking your old life to the new one. Maybe this new life could expand the one I’d built, with my friends and my families, but not replace it. Maybe good l

It had to do with what kind of story expectations they were carrying around inside them.