"Write a Memoir That Tells Me You’re Non-Binary Without Telling Me You’re Non-Binary”: An Interview with CJ Hauser

By Charlotte Fleming 

CJ Hauser’s memoir The Crane Wife (Doubleday 2022) tells the story of their life in a series of essays. In person, they are brilliant and luminous, so it makes sense that their memoir The Crane Wife would breathe onto the page the absolute magic that is CJ Hauser. I met Hauser on my first day as a college student in my very first class as a freshman. It was early enough in the morning that light was coming through all the windows, and I still remember their speaker playing “Pale Blue Eyes” by the Velvet Underground as students entered the classroom.

The Crane Wife was born out of Hauser's viral essay of the same name, published in The Paris Review in 2019, about a called-off wedding, repressed needs leading to self-erasure, the eponymous Japanese folktale and a species of bird called a whooping crane. Since publication, the essay has reached over one million people.

The book, a memoir in essays, uses the titular essay as a launching pad to explore narratives of love and gender that have been played out in the 21st-century Western world; by making sense of their relationships and the art they consume, Hauser invites the reader to explore what makes a life meaningful. The narrative arc threaded throughout the book challenges the idea that a love story begins and ends when a person finds a partner. It is possibly due to the book’s renunciation of traditional narratives and Hauser’s earnest voice that The Crane Wife has been named a best book of 2022 by Time, The Guardian, and Garden & Gun, as well as a finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award.

I connected with Hauser over morning coffee at a busy Brooklyn diner to discuss gender, home, and their self-discovery in writing nonfiction.

Charlotte Fleming: You write about the ways in which you’ve shaped your identity by your relationships. As we move through the book, this palpably changes, with a lot of the change happening in response to epiphanies on the page. Your voice throughout is incredibly potent and strong. How has your voice and identity changed over time?

CJ Hauser: I appreciate you saying that about the “epiphanies on the page” part because, for me, this book was so different from writing fiction. I mean, that happens in fictionland too, but it’s different because it’s not about you, yourself. It’s about the world. But to be writing about your own life and to think, “This is why I do this,” or “This is how I feel about memory,” is the part about writing nonfiction that, when I started doing it, I thought, “Oh, I like this.” This is an active process. To be able to feel like I’m doing that alone at my desk then inviting someone into it, to experience my understanding moving, was really what I wanted to get up to.

CF: What fits into your current identity as a writer and a person?

 CJH: The work is not done. I’m still a chameleon who will try to change into whatever the situation requires. Now I’m aware of it, and I have to check it. I don’t want to say that I’m cured—I’ll never do that old pattern again. It’s still there.

A lot of the movement of the book is away from partnerships and towards community, both of which are things I want and have had in all parts of life, but I think naming the community as the main thing my life runs on is so empowering, refreshing, and relaxing. If I’m existing inside my group of friends, colleagues, students, and different chosen families, especially here in New York City, I’m less likely to do any shape-shifting because I’m with people who have known me and love me as I am.

An ecosystem is healthy for a reason. There are all different parts of prioritizing that community, making space for it by coming to the city and being among my friends and chosen family. Right now, there is an air mattress in my apartment. Four or five people, my friend’s goddaughter who wanted to go to a gay bar, are with us, it’s that sort of thing. The dumbest, most everyday thing, that’s what I want my life to run on.

CF: I’ve read and loved many interviews that explore the virality of your essay “The Crane Wife” and the experience of developing it into a book. Was there a pressure to create stories that touched people as deeply as the titular essay? What was it like, in the room, when you knew you were going to write a memoir in essays?

 CJH: I’m a very stubborn person. I think because it was that essay that made publishers interested in me writing nonfiction and inviting me to write more nonfiction—which I wasn’t sure I wanted to do—that I thought, “No, I’m a fiction writer.” I was afraid of writing nonfiction because I was afraid everyone would want me to do what I had already done. It’s like, you sang a song, everyone liked that one song, and now it’s the moment to make an entire album of those songs. But an album isn’t actually that. An album is many things and many shapes.

I took a year between the initial hubbub around the essay and the questions of whether I would write nonfiction. I took a year to think of what I would want in a nonfiction book and how it could be authentic to what I intellectually wanted to explore and was emotionally interested in. I wasn’t interested in capitalizing on internet success at all; if the essay was going to grow into a book, I wanted it to be a launching pad for the other questions I wanted to ask. I think of the structure of it as needing to go back in time from before the titular essay, then, after the essay, exploring, “If this is what I’ve understood from that experience and writing that piece, what can I do next?” Setting the book up that way made it feel like a thing I needed to learn and think and do as opposed to just complete. That activeness was what appealed to me. There is that feeling [from publishers] of, “Make me feel that way again,” and I’m hopefully not going to feel that way again. I’ll feel a different way and tell you about that.

 CF: From The Philadelphia Story (1940) to The Fantasticks (2000) and The X-Files (1993-2002), the art that moves you is so vivid on the page. Each feels like it belongs in your book about your life. How did you choose what you wanted to explore alongside your own life?

 CJH: I’m going to be on a panel of memoirists called “The Personal is Prelude,” which is a bell hooks quote. It’s all people who weave in a lot of other material beyond the personal into their memoirs.  The idea of writing about myself in a vacuum, without all those other texts and art and research, whether it’s science or TV, I don’t feel like I exist that way. I don’t exist in a vacuum as a human, so the idea of existing on the page as a vacuum didn’t make sense to me. What did make sense was going on a trip to study the whooping crane and reading a folktale. It rattles something loose for me, then I understand the thing and can learn more by writing about it. I knew I’d been watching The Philadelphia Story for twenty years, so I asked myself, “What’s there?”

 I start with just the fact that I’m obsessed with something and the knowledge that I really want to talk about it. I know if I unpack it, I will understand something about myself or relationships or how people imprint upon romantic models of relationships from films, even when they’re not good ones. I can feel there’s something there because I’m obsessing over it.

 What’s at the root of it? If I’m obsessing over something and it’s just, “This is here, I learned this thing from this,” I don’t think that’s a good essay. For me, I start writing about it, I have a theory, I think I know what’s going on, then halfway through the writing process, up is down, and I’m swimming towards the bottom of the sea rather than the surface. It’s that moment when something totally flips on me that I get really interested. I talk myself out of my own initial assumptions about what something means. That’s my favorite kind of writing process.

 CF: Your essay “The Two Thousand Pound Bee” made me feel as though I was with you on the kind of journey you’re describing.

 CJH: That essay is kind of a darling of mine. When we sold the book, I told my agent that I can’t sell this book to anyone who’s going to make me cut this one. I know it’s weird, and it really wasn’t working when it went out on submission. I knew I needed someone who could see that there was something there and would want to work on it with me.

 CF: What have you been feeling inspired or moved by recently? Since writing a memoir, does the art you consume feel in service to the writing process?

 CJH: I'm afraid of that. I’m vigilant and so afraid of the idea that I’d be living my life without being really in it. I try so much not to do that. I sometimes intentionally, when working on new essays, will do research in a place. I went and studied these eco-dwellings in Taos. I said yes to situations in part because I wanted to write about them. In moments like that, when it’s already a research trip, I will take the opportunity to do certain things in part to write about them. On a research trip, especially if I’m invited to spend time with the community I’m researching, that doesn’t feel bad to me. That makes me feel lucky, like what a fun job I have. During actual life experiences, in the minute, when I start thinking, “Maybe I’ll write about this,” is when I’ll stop writing nonfiction.

CF: You make it really clear that your stories are about being a person, they’re not women’s literature, yet gender is always an influence throughout the book. How have you worked out your desire for this book to exist in a way that doesn’t pigeonhole it while still exploring the ways in which gender and labels affect personhood and community?

CJH: I've been shifting my pronouns for the past year or so, and I'm now identifying as a non-binary person with they/them pronouns. That has felt really good. I'm so committed to other folks expressing their gender and choosing their pronouns, but then, because I'm an idiot, I told myself that that kind of respect and choice wasn't available to me. I thought, maybe for me, it wasn't such a big deal to be she/her even if it didn't feel right, like it didn't feel like an emergency, so who was I to ask the way people addressed me to change? Then, of course, the moment I started using they/them pronouns, I felt so much lighter and better. I cried, I was so happy. I felt a loosening in my spine, like I could sit up straight for the first time in ages. I felt like, oh man, I should have done this years ago. Part of the way gender comes up in the book is sort of like, “Write a memoir that tells me you’re non-binary without telling me you’re non-binary.”

I think there’s a real shift in the essays that I wrote first. In “Blood,” which I wrote years and years ago, there’s a lot of questioning about where the woman is in this story. In “The Crane Wife” there’s certainly a lot about womanhood and gendered ideas of needs. I feel informed by all of that. Womanhood has informed my whole life because that’s how I was raised, and that’s how I existed for so long. I was really interested in exploring womanhood for a long time, and it’s a totally valuable thing to do.

But as the book goes on, there's a movement toward thinking of things in a less gender-essentialized way—and man, what a fucking relief that was. I spent a long time thinking maybe my relationship to womanhood was so bad-feeling because there was too much else tied up in it. Maybe it’s models of womanhood I’ve seen in the past. Maybe it’s class. Maybe it’s to do with something else. For a long time, I thought, if I just reshape what it means for me inside the idea of womanhood, then I’ll love being a woman! For me, it didn't work. God, I tried so hard for so long. A lot of the book explores that idea. For a lot of women, especially queer women, this reshaping, reclaiming, and resisting is the good, unfortunately necessary labor that they do and invite other people to do too.

Writing the book, the more I got into it, the less womanhood felt like it was the place I was trying to speak from. Womanhood felt like this very fine sweater that someone had lovingly knitted for me, but it was very itchy and didn't fit my body right. For years I had thought, “Maybe this sweater won’t be so itchy if I wore this shirt underneath it, or maybe this sweater would look cute if I wear these pants with it. Let me try to work with this sweater! Let me try to find a way to make womanhood fit!”

But honestly, I knew for years that this sweater didn't suit me. It felt bad. So I decided to just take the damn sweater off, to stop trying to make my life fit the gender I was issued, and explore gender in a way that actually fits me that feels good to my body. Having done that has felt so beautiful and relieving. Now that I understand myself as non-binary, I have access to my femme energy, to masc, to all sorts of energy that I don't feel a need to taxonomize for other people or even myself.

CF: There are so many ways the concept of home comes up in the book, from your sister’s home in “Unwalling Jackson’s Castle” to the homes in “The Fox Farm” and the found community in “Uncoupling.” In what ways were these homes in conversation with each other?

CJH: I am obsessed with homes and houses. This was a thing I didn’t really know until I wrote the book and felt this idea that houses and home is in everything. I’m really grateful for my family of origin, my biological family. I’m grateful I get to be a part of my sister’s family and to have her children in my life. I love being part of those kinds of family structures, but, for a long time, especially in my early dating life, the internalized thing I was carrying around with me—not in a nefarious way, just in what I had seen—was that the traditional family structure was what I had to replicate because I was convinced that was where safety came from and where love came from. I thought that if I didn’t have that, it would feel dangerous; I wouldn't have access to safety and love like other people.

 I did so many silly, wrong things to try and make that kind of life happen for myself. Then when I achieved it, I realized it didn’t feel the way I wanted it to feel. It didn't fit. A lot of these ideas of home in the book are a way of both validating the beauty of traditional family structures and acknowledging that what I want to build—the sort of home I'll actually feel at home in—doesn't look like that and doesn't mean I have to give up safety and love. What I’m trying to build, even if I someday cohabitate with a long-term partner, would need to be just one part of my ecosystem of beloved and chosen family.

I also struggle with this idea that a home, that a family, has to be permanent, has to be “settled” in your life forever. Did I find the right thing, and can I stay here forever? I am always haunted by this instinct, which does me no favors. Because nothing in life is like that! It’s all figuring it out, reinventing and shifting and wiggling it because if a life, a home, a family doesn’t wiggle with you, it can't feel right over time. I’ve done a lot of thinking and working about how to be held by my friends, family, and chosen family, how to take care of myself by expressing who I actually am, and how I want to move through the world.

The work I'm doing now is to try to make that state of being “home.” To accept that it’s wiggly and impermanent and fluctuating. I can't define what my home will look like on any given day, but I'm learning to trust that if I tend to myself and take good care of my communities, my life will always offer some new strange flavor of love and support and safety—those things I most associate with home.