This Story Will Change: After the Happily Ever After
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.
Forever
Three Words
This Story Will Change
Easy
Paper
Fine Therapy
Everything Is Fine
Inventories
Math
What Marriage Is
I Will Make You Sandwiches
I Will Bake You Cookies
Dinner Though
I Will Never Leave You
Fix This
Needs
They Were Thankful
They Said Nice Things
New Dream
Not So Fine
This Story Will Not Be a Fairy Tale
The Time They Go to Woodstock
This Guy
The Client
Boring
Punks Would Punch You in the Face
Good Firsts
Your Trip
Answers to the Question What Are You Thinking About
Forgetting
States
Good Mother
A Thing
Other Things
A Worse Thing
Maybe the Worst Thing
Emergency
This Story Will Be a True Story
Counseling Again
Tickets
His Birthday
Food
Coffee
She Brought a Big Fish
Festive
Say a Prayer
Just Lean Forward
Faith No More
Whose Life
They Got a Dog
They Got a King-Size Bed
They Got an L-Shaped Sofa
They Moved Upstate
They Watched a Show Called Divorce on the L-Shaped Sofa
Should They Just Have Gone Ahead and Gotten One of Those Long-Ass Dining Room Tables Too?
Sex
This Story Will Not Be the Entire Story
A Different Story
Everything We Need
She Liked Having a Car
She Drove
He Drove
Chicago
Christmas Past
Waco
This Story Will Feel True
Hole
Reading
Marfa
Swimming Holes
She Did Not Hate Living in Brooklyn
The Big Box of Divorce
Paint
Window Treatments
Collaboration
Doesn’t This All Seem Pretty Common and Not Unusual or Even Awful at All in a Long-Term Marriage?
This Level
Marlboro
Trees Are Down
Given
Kalamazoo
Tinder Profile
Excitement
California Screamin’
Fuck Marry Kill
Philadelphia
You Go
New Love Story
The Story Will Not Be the Whole Story
Catastrophe
So Much
Shirts
Dresses
Unlikely
Well This Is Interesting
Fire Island
Vermont
Tuscany
Pilot
This Kid
Different
Whatever We Are
Fun
Mild
Party
Widow
While We’re Here: Ten Scenarios That Might Have Been Preferable
Apples
Priorities
Pajamas
Last Thanksgiving
This Thanksgiving
The Kid’s Boyfriend
Breakup
Same
Let’s Talk About the Kid Again
Christmas Present
No Emergency
Two Minutes
What Happened
Ladies’ Choice
Literally
Promise
The Color of Now
When Will I Believe It
Us
Diners
Dog Park
Before We’re Golden
Kids Bring Laundry
Coincidences
Secret
Gesture
I Don’t but I Do
Less Wrong
Some Sort of Recovery
This Story Has Changed, Again
Only What Is
All We Have to Do
Mexico
Every Little Thing
Twenty-Seven
Northern Sky
Rockefeller
I Miss You
A Walk in the Park
Bits of Dialogue from a Car Ride that Shouldn’t Have Happened a Year after He Moved Out Because She Let Herself Get False Hope after He Recently Acknowledged that He’d Projected Some of His Stuff onto Her
Maybe the Dog
Arguments
Revision
I’m Telling You
Season Finale
This Story Will End
Options
On the Eve of the Shitty Anniversary
It Says Love.
Again
She Could See the Sky
Acknowledgments
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