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Vendor
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

THIS STORY WILL CHANGE

Elizabeth Crane

After the Happily Ever After

Rachel Cusk meets Nora Ephon 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.

Elizabeth Crane is the author of two novels and four collections of short stories, most recently the novel The History of Great Things (Harper Perennial, 2016) and the story collection Turf (Soft Skull, 2017). She is a recipient of the Chicago Public Library 21st Century Award. Her work has been featured on NPR's Selected Shorts and adapted for the stage by Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater. Her debut novel, We Only Know So
Much (Harper Perennial, 2012) has been adapted for film, which premiered in 2018 at the Nantucket Film Festival and won Best Feature at the Big Apple Film Festival. She teaches in the low residency masters
program at UCRiverside Palm Desert.
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Published 2022-08-01 by Counterpoint

Comments

“I haven't read a truer story than this one. I laugh-cried and cry-cried. This Story Will Change is not a divorce book. There is no praying, but there is definitely some eating—and 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 story—the life--changes, and it will keep changing.”

“Impossible to put down...Crane is hilarious, generous, and constantly attuned to the complexities and absurdities of her own life... feels like the texture of thought itself...utterly devastating, utterly alive, and utterly new.” --

“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 gutpunch of divorce...The truth of it—in form and feeling as well as story —took my breath away.”

“At turns funny and dark...a poignant portrait of a woman in transformation.”

“[Crane's] memoir read[s] more like a novel, akin to Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation with short, punchy chapters and unflinching self-analysis.”

“Crane has a way of looking at things, almost microscopically, that makes them appear strange and exquisite and infinitely dimensional and evanescent...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.”

“Reading about another person's pain should not be this enjoyable, but Crane's writing, full of wit and charm, makes it so.”

“A stunning investigation of heartbreak...Poignant, funny, and wise, this is the book you'll be buying for all of your friends.”

“This Story Will Change captures the long arc of a marriage and its messy, human ending: ambivalence, heartbreak, deep grief and unexpected flashes of hope and joy...Crane's wry, vulnerable memoir chronicles the dissolution of her marriage in sharp, intimate detail.”

“[Crane] uses fragments, memory, humor, and kaleidoscopic prose to tell a story that beautifully navigates the challenges and eventual joys that come with deep emotional rupture.”

“It's thrilling.” Read more...

“[A] gorgeous, impressionistic memoir...Crane resists cliché and refuses easy resolution, offering instead a fractured yet richly drawn portrait of a painful year and its surprising gifts.”

“A luminous, devour-in-one-sitting, if-Dept.- of-Speculation-were-amemoir, sly, hopeful, and intense deconstruction of her long marriage. If you ever had your heart broken, 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.”

“It is difficult at times not to scream while reading...sometimes in exquisite recognition...it reflects both marriage itself and the experience of listening to anyone talk about their own, past or present.” Read more...