Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship
Gail Caldwell
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 0812979117
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
They met over their dogs. Gail Caldwell and Caroline Knapp (author of Drinking: A Love Story) became best friends, talking about everything from their love of books and their shared history of a struggle with alcohol to their relationships with men. Walking the woods of New England and rowing on the Charles River, these two private, self-reliant women created an attachment more profound than either of them could ever have foreseen. Then, several years into this remarkable connection, Knapp was diagnosed with cancer. With her signature exquisite prose, Caldwell mines the deepest levels of devotion, and courage in this gorgeous memoir about treasuring a best friend, and coming of age in midlife. Let’s Take the Long Way Home is a celebration of the profound transformations that come from intimate connection—and it affirms, once again, why Gail Caldwell is recognized as one of our bravest and most honest literary voices.
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shy, resonant voice. We passed a few polite words of mutual regard, then moved apart to make the necessary rounds. When I saw her again, a few years later, standing near the duck pond at Fresh Pond Reservoir in Cambridge, we had both downscaled in appearance. Each of us had young dogs, and a dog trainer we knew had recently mentioned Caroline to me. “Do you know Caroline Knapp?” Kathy had said. “She has a puppy, too. You remind me of each other—you should try to get together.” I had mouthed
book had just enjoyed. I had a different perspective, from experience and intuition. If writers possess a common temperament, it’s that they tend to be shy egomaniacs; publicity is the spotlight they suffer for the recognition they crave. The personal empathy came from my comparatively cloistered past: I had stopped drinking twelve years earlier, in 1984. But whereas Caroline had gone mainstream with her addiction, I was old school and deeply private about my own struggles with alcohol. I
understood what Caroline wanted; as much as she and I both longed for happy endings, we didn’t necessarily believe in them. Now life was proving to be rougher than that in every dimension. I finally found a sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay that was both bearable and true, that spoke to Fate’s destruction of “destiny’s bright spinning.” Caroline called while I was reading it. “I have one,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure it’s too dark.” Then I read her the first few lines. “I pray you if you love
Her arms became her eloquence from that day on. One night when I was sitting next to her bed, I laid my head down on the mattress beside her, and Morelli saw my weariness and got up to place a towel underneath my neck. It was one of countless acts of grace he provided in the next few weeks, when nothing much mattered but the light in the room and the number of breaths taken. Then Caroline flung out her arm and ran her hand through my hair, enough to comfort me for days, and we stayed that way
eighteen, during the height of the Great Depression. She’d made her way in the workforce for a decade before marrying my dad, then waited until her late thirties to have children—a radical gesture for mid-twentieth-century America. She celebrated any route toward contentment: When my sister had her daughter, Ruby was out of her mind with joy; when I left Texas for the East and became a writer, she acted as though I’d climbed Kilimanjaro. Whatever alternate paths my mother may have envisioned for