CJ Hauser Is Making Meaning from a Fragmented Life

Ladane Nasseri interviews CJ Hauser about her memoir in essays ‘The Crane Wife,’ the impact of a viral publication, and the braided-essay form.

Like many, I came to CJ Hauser’s work via her viral essay “The Crane Wife,” which published three years ago. The piece—a braiding of at first seemingly unrelated topics into a meaningful and candid narrative with a satisfying landing—drew over a million readers.

“The Crane Wife” is the title essay of Hauser’s memoir in essays, and if you appreciated its introspective tone, your enjoyment is bound to multiply with her latest book. The Crane Wife consists of similarly surprising combinations and self-reflective musings, woven together with Hauser’s warm and witty voice. In one story about her ideal home, she sets to interview kids about their dream houses and reports back. Some of the essays are whimsical, while others take on a melancholy tone—though never for too long, because as Hauser says, “In the thick of our feelings, we are a family who cracks a joke and hopes for the best.”

In these essays incorporating family, friends, and lovers, Hauser’s efforts to negotiate these ties and examine what constitutes a meaningful life are in full display. Her essays are about stories told and stories absorbed, stories that ended and stories that never quite began—stories that the author for too long did not even know were worthy of being named as such. “What stories were you told, and not told, about the shape of love, the shape of yourself, the shape of a happy life?” she asks in these pages. “What were you told had to happen in a story for it to feel complete?”

Hauser and I spoke on Zoom earlier this month. Our conversation was edited for clarity and length.

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Ladane Nasseri: These days, writers are often told that having a viral essay increases their chance of getting an agent and a book deal. You had already published two novels, so it was different for you, but how did the book come about after the success of that essay? Did the fact that it went viral give you momentum to write the memoir or make it more challenging because it raised the stakes?

CJ Hauser: I tell my students to make a thing because it is the weirdest, truest thing you have to write, and I have to believe it will find the people it needs to find—whether that’s a couple people or a lot of people. That’s how I worked for years, and normally my writing had reached just a couple people. All you can do is write your weird thing, and this weird thing happened to reach a lot of people. I would have never written this book if what happened with the essay had not happened. I had no intention of writing nonfiction about myself; I had a novel I was working on. My editor said, “So, are we thinking about nonfiction?” and I was like, “Absolutely not. This changes nothing about the art I’m going to make.” After being stubborn and petulant for a while, I got excited that people were having conversations about the stuff in the essay. I had a bunch of other ideas—I had been keeping a document of nonfiction ideas for some time. I went on my sabbatical and was going to keep writing the novel, and I thought, I’ll just take these notes with me and see what happens. I was writing both and then got hooked on the Belushi essay. At that point I thought, Sorry, novel, you have to wait, because I’m now deeply obsessed with John Belushi.

LN: You knew this was going to be a memoiristic endeavor, but did you know it was going to be in the form of an essay collection?

CJH: It was always going to be fragmented. I read memoirs. I love memoirs. I love when someone can see their life in that beautiful book-like shape, but there are too many different parts of my life and there is not one unifying story, which is what this book is about: Why does it sometimes feel like your life does not have one unifying story? Like “This is my marriage and I’m celebrating my fiftieth anniversary,” or “This is my career and look how beautiful this arc of success is.” When the shape of your life does not translate into this unifying narrative, it sometimes feels like you are doing it wrong, or the things you’ve done don’t count or were just trials for the ones that will work out later. I wanted the structure of the book to make meaning from a life that is fragmented and make it feel like a whole thing without pretending it was unified the whole time.

LN: In my own writing, I sometimes feel a tension between having a plan and wanting to know what I am writing toward and allowing space for surprises and discoveries. How do you approach this?

CJH: I knew there were pieces I wanted to write, unified by this idea of making meaning from our life with story shapes, talking back to that, and breaking it a little bit. I also wanted to talk about love, but love in a broader way than just romantic partnerships. I wanted to talk about books and art. Those things were percolating around, but I had no idea what I was doing. I had an index card board—I call it a “murder board”—on the wall with different pieces and where they would go. As things came together and the pieces started speaking to each other, the process of working with my editor and agent became one of “What does this piece have to say to that one?”

LN: So did you have a sense of the through line, or did that come in the process, as you looked back at what you had written?

CJH: I wanted the essays to have—if not a through line—an emotional arc as a whole. “The Crane Wife” essay was largely about “How the hell did I let this happen?” Sometimes when a person is overeducated, like I am—I am a feminist, I am open-minded—you think they are not going to wind up in this thing that makes them small, and yet I did. Knowing as many things as I know, and still making terrible decisions. Insomuch as this essay is the reason why this book came to be, the question was, “How did I get here and where am I going to go now that I realize I’m a person to whom that can happen?” I knew I wanted to go back to family and see what the stories that I have been given about love are; how we are supposed to act in love? Which stories did I chuck, and which did I keep sneakily stored away with me over time? I had a phase where I thought I could be hyperrational, like, “I will read ten more bell hooks books and then I will be fine.” That doesn’t work. So I wanted to write about what it meant to try to hold on tight and logically solve things and to have to let go of that. There is no way to protect yourself with rules; there is an amount of risk and danger in love that feels implicit to it. The last section is about “What are we going to build here? What does a more expansive and more vulnerable view of this look like?”

LN: In therapy, one approach consists of getting the patient to tell old stories in a new way. It feels like that’s what you were doing, looking at some life stories differently, starting with how you told them to yourself.

CJH: It’s exactly that. It’s so powerful to do that. It does not deny the hurt of what happened before, or the struggle of it, but it was not serving me to keep telling myself the stories the original way. It felt empowering to say, “Here are the love stories of my life, they matter, they all count, even if they’re [with] people who are not in my life anymore, even if they’re [with] people who we would not think of as love stories.”

I wanted the structure of the book to make meaning from a life that is fragmented.

LN: You have several epiphanies in these essays. Some spur from friends’ comments, or lines in books or movies, and sometimes I felt it was the result of your thinking on the page. Did you have these epiphanies and want to write about them, or did they manifest as you were writing and being exploratory on the page?

CJH: That’s a cool question. I hadn’t thought about that. It’s both. With the Belushi essay, there was no epiphany I was writing toward. I did not know for ages what that essay was about. I just knew I was interested and there was something there. I write partly because I love this feeling of searching for meaning and making meaning. Sometimes I don’t finish essays because they don’t resolve into something that feels worth it to me. Sometimes, [other] people tell me it’s not working. When someone says it’s not working it’s not because they don’t get it—it’s because you haven’t found the thing yet that’s going to make it work. It’s frustrating, but it’s the highest high when you finally crack it, and you get to that place of “Yeah! This is what I was trying to figure out.” That was a big part of the experience of writing the book, and so there are live epiphanies on the page!

LN: It’s a delicate balancing act. It takes playing around to find the right idea, the right symbolism or image, but you still want the story to stay true to the experience and your feelings at the time. You don’t want to change it by engineering it too much.

CJH: Yes. There are many ways to make the experience you had come alive for the reader, feel more like it felt to you, and it’s constructed: A play is more constructed than reality, but sometimes putting on a play helps it come across in a way a video recording of what happened never would. Leaving room for messiness and fragments and [not forcing things] to fall into a particular shape is a big part of that.

LN: You jump in time, you shift POV, sometimes you address the reader directly. How much leeway did you give yourself so that the form of these essays is not repetitive but so there is some coherence as a whole?

CJH: If you have an intuitive reason for why a story needs to be taken out of order, told in a stylized way, or have braided threads, then normally you will find a way to revise it and make it work for the reader. It starts with gut choices. I don’t usually start with form.

LN: What do you start with?

CJH: There is a practice I have gotten into. I have something labeled a “garbage draft”—sometimes I call it a compost heap. I just draft; I write words and words. I have another document opened to the right and it’s called “scrap and sources.” Anytime I look something up, I read a book, I add it there. I make sure I have a list of everything I have consulted. I want to find my way back to everything. The garbage draft starts to come together as I pass through it and more things migrate over to the scrap.

LN: The threads in “The Crane Wife” essay (breaking your engagement, going on the scientific expedition, and reading the folklore story) all seemed to happen around the same time. How did you choose the braids for some of the other essays?

CJH: Like what gets blended with what? It’s just weird up here [in my head]! Sometimes it’s hard to communicate, even with friends—because I want to tell you about this thing I’ve come to understand, but I need to talk a lot about robots to get there. That’s just who I am as a person! Other times I know it’s something I want to write about because I’m obsessed with it, like The X-Files, while the wedding of my friends Liv and Meg was a meaningful experience. It was such an honor to be asked to be at the helm of a wedding. I knew I wanted to write about it, but I didn’t have anything to say other than “these people are in love, it’s beautiful.” Neither of these are essays on their own, but sometimes these things are kicking around your brain and then one day they get close enough to each other to develop a magnetic pull and you think, Oh, interesting! Maybe if I put these two in conversation, there is something to be said.

LN: Your voice is one of the things that stands out throughout all these essays. You have talked about coming across some of the original, unedited stories of Raymond Carver and how in those versions, he was “full of sweetness and kindness to the world.” Is voice revealed with practice or constructed through revisions and editing? And how did you develop your writerly voice?

CJH: It’s both of those over the course of a life of writing. Voice was not something I was working on here; I am old enough to have been writing long enough. My voice is my voice at this point. When I was younger, it was constructed and I was trying on different hats, like you do when you are growing up: “Today I am going to high school and I am definitely a punk, and I am so tough.” And the next day it’s “Today I am wearing my rainbow mittens and I am a soft person.” You are trying to figure out who you are and eventually you are like, “Oh! I am all these things.” When I was younger and I was writing, I was trying on things for size. I wrote bad knockoff Carver, bad knockoff Salinger. By trying on the voices of people who seemed powerful to me, or who seemed emotionally moving to me, they probably all became part of my voice. So it is constructed, but it was a while ago. I also read out loud when I am drafting, and if something doesn’t sound like it could come out of my mouth in real life, it goes.

LN: The first line in your acknowledgment reads, “This is the unlikeliest of books. I meant to go on inventing people and islands and ducks in fictional perpetuity and never write about myself at all.” What had stopped you until then?

CJH: I’m not that interested in myself. I like to read to escape myself and I like to write to escape myself. The experience of therapy is one of the things that made me realize that spending time thinking about myself and how I work inside is not antithetical to art, and that maybe it would be enjoyable, and fruitful, to not put up a puppet play of fiction for once. I still love fiction the most, but therapy opened me up to the fact that maybe if I looked at myself for more than a minute, it wouldn’t be the death of art or the death of me.

LN: You have said, “I mostly write essays about things I have been wrong about. This is what I’m interested in.” Tell me more.

CJH: This is also the kind of nonfiction I’m interested in reading. People finding problems, learning moments, the times things broke, and times things healed. I have zero percent interest in reading books about, “Here is the story of my success and how I figured it all out and became very good at the thing.” That is a valuable thing to write, a valuable thing to read, but that is not where my heart is. I’m interested in moments when I think I figured things out. If this whole book is a recursive mental process, the mental process is like, “I learned a thing, I know a thing,” and then it’s like, “Oh, lost it again, it broke,” or “it wasn’t true all the time.” This book is about how there is no such thing—at least for me—as stable ground forever. Even if you find people who are long-term love stories, that too is going to grow in bends and you’re going to be wrong, and you will have to wiggle around to make sure it’s something you can carry forward. I write a lot about being wrong, but it’s being wrong as in, “Oh, look! Here’s another time I thought I figured it out, and here’s the world reminding us to be humble and curious and open.”