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This Story Will Change: After the Happily Ever After

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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