The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays

The absurdity of how my world seemed to be ending just months ago, and yet, here I am, in this new, ordinary place, and quite happy.

I didn’t leave when he said that the woman he had cheated on me with had told him over the phone that she thought it was unfair that I didn’t want them to be friends anymore. I didn’t leave when he wanted to invite her to our wedding. Or when, after I said she could not come to our wedding, he got frustrated and asked what he was supposed to do whe

Christian makes a brilliant comparison between most polite conversation—small talk—and the “book,” arguing that true human interaction doesn’t start happening until one or both of the participants diverge from their scripts of culturally defined pleasantries. The book is necessary in some ways, as it is in chess (Bobby Fischer would disagree), in o

I long for a conversation partner who travels through an abundance of interesting material at breakneck speed, shouting over their shoulder at me, “Keep up!” Someone who assumes I am up for the challenge, someone who assumes the best of me.

it felt powerful to laugh about the world as we liked to imagine we could live in it.

When the world is on fire, and bees want to give you smallpox, and aliens are rummaging around your womb, sometimes there is one person who you can come to trust completely.

The sun ducks beneath the tide line in one last orange snap and we clap for it. For the fucking sun. We are those people. And who isn’t, really. We’ve got one more lap in, after all. We should be so lucky.

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 shame of having been wrong about him, doubled down on being wrong, on and off, for six years, was almost worse than the heartbreak. Almost.