ELIZABETH CRANE is the author of six works of fiction, most recently the novel The History of Great Things and the story collection Turf. She is a recipient of the Chicago Public Library Foundation 21st Century Award. Her work has been featured on NPR's Selected Shorts and adapted for the stage by Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre. Her novel, We Only Know So Much, has been adapted for film. She teaches in the low-residency master's program at UC Riverside-Palm Desert. She lives in Upstate New York.
"Thrilling." -The New York Times Book Review
"In This Story Will Change, [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." -Sarah Neilson, Shondaland
"At turns funny and dark, This Story Will Change is a
poignant portrait of a woman in transformation and a chronicle of
how even the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are bound to
change." -PureWow
"In This Story Will Change, Crane uses her narrative skills
to excavate her relationship. Crane writes in the third person,
creating emotional distance as though she can objectively describe
the dissolution of her own marriage. This technique makes the
memoir read more like a novel, akin to Jenny Offill's Dept. of
Speculation with short, punchy chapters and unflinching
self-analysis." -Bookpage
"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 . . . Elizabeth Crane's wry,
vulnerable memoir chronicles the dissolution of her marriage in
sharp, intimate detail." -Shelf Awareness
"In this gorgeous, impressionistic memoir, fiction writer Crane
turns to nonfiction to investigate her marriage and its dissolution
. . . [She] resists cliche and refuses easy resolution, offering
instead a fractured yet richly drawn portrait of a painful year and
its surprising gifts." -Booklist (starred review)
"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 . . . Reading about another
person's pain should not be this enjoyable, but Crane's writing,
full of wit and charm, makes it so." -Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)
"All memoirs claim to be true stories, but I haven't read a truer
story than this one. I laugh-cried and cry-cried. Elizabeth Crane's
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." -Maggie Smith, author of Keep
Moving
"Elizabeth Crane has written a book that feels like intimate
company and impossible grace. It's also impossible to put down. The
momentum of this book doesn't 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 broken-a
marriage-and rather than trying to put these fragments back
together, it uses them to create something utterly new." -Leslie
Jamison, author of Make It Scream, Make It Burn
"Elizabeth Crane's debut memoir is a stunning investigation of
heartbreak, but it's also an exploration of what it means to
rebuild one's life after a long marriage. Poignant, funny, and
wise, this is the book you'll be buying for all of your friends."
--Emily Rapp Black, author of Sanctuary
"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. But Crane gives us
so much more than a marriage memoir. It's how our bodies move
forward-one foot in front of the other, make it to the end of the
day-while our heads go back-what the hell just happened and what
could I have done differently? The truth of it-in form and feeling
as well as story-took my breath away." -Megan Stielstra, author of
The Wrong Way to Save Your Life
"Elizabeth Crane has a way of looking at things, almost
microscopically, that makes them appear strange and exquisite and
infinitely dimensional and evanescent-like 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
"Elizabeth Crane has written a luminous, devour-in-one-sitting,
if-The-Department-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
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