In 2019, CJ Hauser called off their wedding –– ten days later, they went on an expedition to study the whooping crane. This is the setup of “The Crane Wife,” a 2019 Paris Review essay that quickly attracted over a million views. Later, it became the title essay for Hauser’s memoir-in-essays, “The Crane Wife,” published in 2022. “The Crane Wife” looks at the stories about love passed down from generation to generation, questioning our assumptions and challenging our beliefs. It’s an honest look into the “self-erasing” that Hauser experienced in many of their relationships –– and, judging by how the piece was received, with which many of us can identify.
Hauser, a novelist who teaches at Colgate University, is also the author of “Family of Origin” (2019) and “The From-Aways” (2014). Now on sabbatical, Hauser is writing fiction as well as “weird essays” about things like the Oneida commune in upstate New York. They were shifting between Hamilton, New York, where Hauser teaches, and Brooklyn, New York –– but recently made the “disastrous financial decision” to rent an apartment in Brooklyn –– in part because “I was slowly losing my mind.”
“I was like, ‘If I don’t have more art people and more gay people in my life, I’m simply going to die,’” Hauser told me, on our recent phone call. Here’s our conversation, edited for clarity.
Hope Reese (HR): You resisted writing “The Crane Wife” at first –– you were working on a novel at the time. Have you gone back to that? Have your feelings about nonfiction changed?
CJ Hauser (CJH): I’m stubborn and often wrong about things, and I think that the purpose of writing this nonfiction book was, “Oh, shit. Of course, nonfiction can be so many beautiful, strange, different kinds of things.” I had it in my head that it wasn’t something that was for me. I thought it had to be either, like, straight journalism or the story of my life from A to Z –– and neither of those things I’m cut out for.
Most things in my life, at sort of the same moment, the boundaries between them became silly to me. Writing fiction and writing nonfiction. There are different processes and different inspirations, but it’s still writing. And then with gender, coming out as non-binary, it’s like,
“Oh my God, why am I hemming and hawing about which thing I am and which way I should be headed?” I feel that way about the city and the country too. So, in these three big categories in my life, I’ve definitely come into a place like, “What if it was both and all of the above at the same time? Always?”
Then all of a sudden I wasn’t trying to be something or get anywhere –– that went away. I hadn’t realized how much mental space that took up.
HR: Can you talk more about the gender part? In The Crane Wife, you use “she/her” –– but recently, you have officially come out as going by “they/them.” Why did you decide to make the change?
CJH: After being isolated in rural America for a really long time, like seven years, I started being in spaces and places and beautiful friends who were asking me to identify. My friend Alex asked me how I identified and I was like, “Um, I’m just a lady.” And I hated it. I felt like I was doing something that I didn’t want to be true. And I couldn’t say the word woman. I couldn’t even do it. That sort of sent me into, “Well, maybe we should think about this a little bit more.” I had a group of important non-binary friends, and we were they-theming the fuck out of each other. And I was so happy! I was like, I don’t want to feel that way ever again. Then all of a sudden I wasn’t trying to be something or get anywhere –– that went away. I hadn’t realized how much mental space that took up.
I feel empathy for my past self, who I see trying to make this thing work. The thing being, being the woman. I just want to go back in time and relieve them of that and be like, “You don’t have to make it work. If it doesn’t work for you, you don’t have to do it.”
RH: And what does it mean for you now, as you read back on your previous work?
CJH: To read through those essays now, I’m grappling with womanhood so hard and I’m trying to be like, “And here’s how it’s going to be okay for me.” Towards the end of the book, there’s definitely a little bit of a shift –– or at least there was inside of me when I was writing them. I feel empathy for my past self, who I see trying to make this thing work. The thing being, being the woman. I just want to go back in time and relieve them of that and be like, “You don’t have to make it work. If it doesn’t work for you, you don’t have to do it.” Being in that place now is so fucking beautiful. But maybe I never would have got to this place if I had really not done the work of wrestling with it.
RH: In “The Crane Wife,” you wrote “in hetero relationships my choices and desires always seem to yield more easily to men’s.” Has that pattern changed when you entered into different relationships?
CJH: As a person who’s now lucky enough to live in a less rural place and, like, dates more widely, I definitely still have that impulse. So I think I was wrong. It’s probably more socialized and encouraged in those hetero relationships. And sometimes I want to blame this on culture –– but it’s me.
It’s harder to answer yourself truthfully when the external signifiers of what’s going on look like a love story, and everyone’s so excited for you.
RH: You write about the hierarchy of romantic love –– is “The Crane Wife” an attempt to deconstruct that, a bit? To dismantle it?
CJH: The book is about the stories that we’ve received, heard, chosen to believe and accidently internalized about what love looks like, what a love story looks like, what a relationship looks like. So much of that gets tied up in gender. We’re taught like, “Oh yeah, you are supporting this man in his dreams,” or “you are this person who is so strong on their own.”
But what if there’s doubt –– like, “does this relationship, this dynamic, these things this person’s doing, like, do these things make me happy?” It’s harder to answer yourself truthfully when the external signifiers of what’s going on look like a love story, and everyone’s so excited for you.
The alternative is to do it your own way, which is, Thank God, what my life looks like now. But it’s scary because no one’s telling you you’re doing it right. No one’s celebrating you. They’re saying that you’re doing it wrong and you’re incorrect and a terrible person and there are laws against you. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. But it’s a hard drug to quit.
RH: Do you think, in general, the concept of marriage doesn’t quite fit into the world we live in today? Doesn’t it feel outdated?
CJH: Hell yeah. I mean, the world is a very peculiar place right now, but those structures, those relationships, those timelines –– the way time works in relationships, and the way we think it’s supposed to work –– all of that stuff is so out of sync with the economic reality we’re living in. And a million other things.
RH: In “The Crane Wife,” you write about how when you loosened up your ideas of sex and love being attached to parenthood, “things shifted,” and you became open to polyamory. How has this view evolved?
CJH: I started dating in a more polyamorous way, I guess, because people I fell for were poly, and I had a lot of love for them. So I thought, why would I reject this out of form? It was a thing I did for a while, and it wound up hurting me pretty badly. And I think I hurt people pretty badly. I had experiences that were sometimes beautiful, but sometimes emotionally painful for me. I’m not sure if it’s because I haven’t figured out what I want it to look like, or if I’m just not poly. I don’t want to believe in monogamy –– intellectually, philosophically, no. But I’m still working it out.
RH: What are you working out in your essays these days? What’s your new focus?
CJH: The essays that I’m interested in writing now are about sitting in spaces of not knowing, things not being defined. It’s a lot like learning and planning and failure. I’m calling it “beginner energy” –– the idea of knowing a lot of things, having a lot of experience but still approaching the world and new situations in a place of not naivete, but like, “let’s not assume we know what this is going to be, or how it’s going to go, or how it’s going to act.” And that’s the way I want to be in the world now.
