Elizabeth Crane - This Story Will Change: After the Happily Ever After

PRAISE FOR

This Story Will Change

Elizabeth Crane has written a book that feels like intimate company and impossible grace. Its also impossible to put down. The momentum of this book doesnt come from making us wonder how the story ends, but from its insistence that the end of the story is just the beginning. Crane is hilarious, generous, and constantly attuned to the complexities and absurdities of her life. In the fragments of this book, she has done the remarkable work of finding a structure that feels like the texture of thought itself: the way the mind returns to the scene of a terrible crime (or a great love) and approaches it from as many angles as possible. This book is picking up the shards of something big and beautiful and brokena marriageand rather than trying to put these fragments back together, it is using them to create something utterly new.

Leslie Jamison, author of Make It Scream, Make It Burn

All memoirs claim to be true stories, but I havent read a truer story than this one. I laugh-cried and cry-cried. Elizabeth Cranes This Story Will Change is not a divorce book. There is no praying, but there is definitely some eatingand plenty of loving, though not in, as she writes, a losing one dude and then meeting a new dude and then everything is better kind of way. What there is, in spades, is truth. And the truth is, the storythe lifechanges, and it will keep changing.

Maggie Smith, author of Keep Moving

Elizabeth Cranes debut memoir is a stunning investigation of heartbreak, but its also an exploration of what it means to rebuild ones life after a long marriage. Poignant, funny, and wise, this is the book youll be buying for all of your friends.

Emily Rapp Black, author of Sanctuary

Elizabeth Crane has a way of looking at things, almost microscopically, that makes them appear strange and exquisite and infinitely dimensional and evanescentlike vanishing snowflakes. In This Story Will Change, she processes the sudden end of her long marriage by examining it through the prism of property, promises, dreams, expectations, and totemic objects, exploring the stories we tell ourselves and each other in the process of co-creating our lives. With characteristic humor, lightness, and grace, and much in the manner of a jeweler dismantling an intricate watch, Crane reveals marriage as a delicate machine for producing the illusion of permanence as bittersweet consolation against the constant, inevitable, irrevocable change that defines the human condition.

Carina Chocano, author of You Play the Girl

There is no writer like Elizabeth Crane. This Story Will Change gives us the first year of loss in all its confusion and upheaval; in this case, the gut punch of divorce. But Crane gives us so much more than a marriage memoir. Its how our bodies move forwardone foot in front of the other, make it to the end of the daywhile our heads go backwhat the hell just happened and what could I have done differently? The truth of itin form and feeling as well as storytook my breath away.

Megan Stielstra, author of The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

Elizabeth Crane has written a luminous, devour-in-one-sitting, if-Dept.-of-Speculation-were-a-memoir, sly, hopeful, and intense deconstruction of her long marriage. If you ever had your heart broken, ever wondered whether memory plays tricks with you, or blamed someone else for things that might have been your own fault, read this book. I have been every person in this story in one way or another, and so have you.

Gina Frangello, author of Blow Your House Down

ALSO BY ELIZABETH CRANE

Turf

The History of Great Things

We Only Know So Much

You Must Be This Happy to Enter

All This Heavenly Glory

When the Messenger Is Hot

For Janie and Michael

Once upon a time in 2004 a woman and a man were married in a backyard ceremony on a glorious September Saturday on the West Side of Chicago, handmade streamers in the trees, friends and family present to bear witness. They were happy and in love and people knew they were happy and in love. If anyone thought, Oh this is a terrible idea, they forever held their peace. Many of them spoke as the spirit moved them to share why they celebrated this love, and the celebration seemed genuine, and the couple was like, These people all get it, cool, we knew it, this marriage really is a good idea. But who knows, maybe someone did hold their peace. Maybe they could ask. They would have to ask everyone. Theyve lost touch with some of them. Sometimes on purpose. Which is not a thing you want to have to say about people who were at your wedding. What if someone held their peace and then they died? What if they got in touch with everyone who had been in attendance and every one of them said No we didnt hold our peace, we were psyched for you, but it was one or all of the people who died or lost touch who had held their peace? This wedding was fifteen years ago. Several people in attendance have died. Her dad died. The woman was so sure her dad loved her husband. But what if he was just happy that she was happy, and just crossed his fingers and hoped for the best? Or what if people lied about holding their peace, and said to their faces We were not holding our peaces, and/or what if everyone was just going along with this obviously doomed union, because lets face it, love isnt always enough, and maybe more than one person who died had extensive notes on why they thought this marriage was doomed, but held their peace, because they knew people did what they wanted, but then everyone died always having held their peace, leaving the couple to never know what they really thought and/or, moreover, maybe possibly in some universe, changing the course of the couples history, you know, if theyd listened, and they were like Youre right, love isnt enough, and they walked away and had lives that were better in ways they couldnt have imagined then, since everything seemed so great at the time, but instead they went ahead and got married, because they didnt know there were all these unspoken predictors of doom. If everyone held their peace, and then they died with all their peaces, how would the couple ever know? We were there. We doubt either of them would have listened.

Just after New Years, the married couple is in their bedroom, getting dressed for the day, and its one of those moments when a person whos lived with another person for fifteen years knows something is on the other persons mind. The husband is oddly quiet, unresponsive, far away. Maybe the wife is being too cheerful this early in the morning. A million years ago she didnt like anyone talking to her in the morning either. Maybe its annoying. Maybe its one of those days. But shes gonna ask.