This Story Will Change
After the Happily Ever After
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Rachel Cusk meets Nora Ephron in this intimate and evolving portrait about the end of a marriage and how life can fall apart and be rebuilt in wonderful and surprising ways
One minute Elizabeth Crane and her husband of fifteen years are fixing up their old house in Upstate New York, finally setting down roots after stints in Chicago, Texas, and Brooklyn, when his unexpected admission—I’m not happy—changes everything. Suddenly she finds herself separated and in couples therapy, living in an apartment in the city with an old friend and his kid. It’s understood that the apartment and bonus family are temporary, but the situation brings unexpected comfort and much-needed healing for wounds even older than her marriage.
Crafting the story as the very events chronicled are unfolding, Crane writes from a place of guarded possibility, capturing through vignettes and collected moments a semblance of the real-time practice of healing. At turns funny and dark, with moments of poignancy, This Story Will Change is an unexpected and moving portrait of a woman in transformation, a chronicle of how even the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are bound to change.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
