This Story Will Change

Starred review from May 15, 2022
An unexpected announcement by her husband of 15 years--"I am not happy"--leads a wife, brokenhearted and bewildered, to her writing desk. Divorce memoirs come in two main flavors: the doers and the done-to. This is definitely a done-to, with torrents of internal monologue revisiting and rehashing conversations and events, and the author renders it all compellingly and insightfully. Readers who have enjoyed Crane's path through autobiographical fiction are sure to love this refreshing memoir. Instead of first person, the author casts herself as "the wife," "she," and occasionally "you," a technique that creates an interesting doubleness: There is a narrator, and there is a main character, providing extra room for sympathy, evaluation, and analysis. (One tiny, darkly hilarious chapter, titled "Tinder Profile," does use first person: "I was married for fifteen years. We separated a year ago. I cry all the time still, I can't think about much of anything else. I hope you find that sexy. I don't go to the gym. Fuck the gym....Do not ask me to bike ride in the city, I didn't do it for my husband and I won't do it for you. I eat whatever food I like, but I don't cook and I don't drink. I have no time for your angsty middle-aged bullshit. Grow up. I'm really much nicer than this." Crane also forgoes names, using "the husband," "her bud," "his kid," etc. After escaping the small upstate New York town where her carpenter spouse fell in love with his client, the author returned to her hometown of New York City, where wealthy friends loaned her a loft in the East Village. This move marked a turning point in her mental state, which she chronicles with candor and grace. Despite the tumult in her life, it's clear that people really love Crane and want to help--and readers will see why. Reading about another person's pain should not be this enjoyable, but Crane's writing, full of wit and charm, makes it so.

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Starred review from July 1, 2022
In this gorgeous, impressionistic memoir, fiction writer Crane (Turf, 2017) turns to nonfiction to investigate her marriage and its dissolution. In short poetic threads, she narrates the story of husband and wife by shifting between voices; a distant-yet-knowing third person gives way to a second person perspective of self-accusation and a first-person litany of regret, speculation, and introspective wrangling. Crane grapples with the limits of perspective, admitting that her book "will be a one-sided story," warning us not to lapse into any assumptions about narrative ("I don't want this to be a story about losing one dude and then meeting a new dude and everything is better"), and revealing, in a small but startling twist, that an unkind comment her husband made years ago--one that she dwelled on obsessively--was a fabrication of her memory. When Crane leaves her upstate home to live in New York City with an old friend and his daughter, the reader wonders if this might be the new dude she promised to avoid, but instead she gives us an alternative version of family based on loving friendship. Crane resists clich� and refuses easy resolution, offering instead a fractured yet richly drawn portrait of a painful year and its surprising gifts.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

July 25, 2022
In this inventive-to-a-fault memoir, novelist Crane (The History of Great Things) recounts the fragmentation of her marriage in the third person. The unnamed characters are defined by roles: the husband, the wife, the bud (an old friend who becomes the wife’s roommate), and the kid (the bud’s teenage daughter). The husband and wife meet in Chicago through AA: he’s in his 20s and newly sober, she’s a decade in the program and in her early 40s. They move frequently (Chicago, Texas, Brooklyn) to support his art career, then settle in an anonymous “historic city” in upstate New York. The husband undertakes window restoration for neighbors; the wife writes, teaches, and ruminates. He suggests an open marriage (she flatly refuses), then has an affair with a client. Wealthy friends offer the wife their Manhattan pied-à-terre, and the bud joins with the kid in tow. The trio form an accidental, affectionate family that restores the wife to hope. Events are told in short chapters, a mosaic of loosely linear scenes embedded with flashbacks. The rare first-person chapters are Crane’s most incisive moments; the formula elsewhere has a distancing effect and begins to drag. Readers will wish Crane’s vulnerable and revealing moments weren’t held captive behind the artifice of style. Agent: Alice Tasman, Jean V. Nagger Literary.