Review by New York Times Review
EARLIER this year, I watched someone close to me die. A raw couple of weeks later, with the kind of timing that leaves you unsure whether to laugh or cry, our family dog suddenly had to be put down. In the days and weeks that followed, I heard myself trying to explain the awful, numbing collision of these two deaths, and I worried that I sounded at best ludicrous, at worst callous. It says a lot for "Let's Take the Long Way Home," Gail Caldwell's ferociously anguished chronicle of her best friend's terminal cancer, that it manages to be, among many other things, a properly intelligent examination of the way in which dogs can help heal our past, enhance and challenge our knowledge of ourselves, even shed light on the mysterious workings of the human soul. If female friendship is the beating heart of this book, then a bond with a dog is the vein of pure tenderness that runs through its pages. You feel that the women's friendship would never have existed in quite the same way without this crucial, balancing canine element. Caldwell and her friend Caroline Knapp had more than dogs in common when they met in the 1990s. Though nine years apart in age, they shared alcoholic pasts, an almost obsessive love of water (Caldwell swam, Knapp rowed) and successful careers as writers. Caldwell was (and still is) a respected literary critic, Knapp a columnist and the author of "Drinking: A Love Story," a much-feted, daringly open memoir about her alcoholism. They shared something else as well. While not exactly giving up on relationships with men (Knapp later married her on-again-off-again photographer boyfriend), these two strong, thoughtful, independent, middle-aged women were mainly concerned with regaining their self-respect and taking control. It was entirely appropriate that they took the first steps toward friendship while out walking their dogs because the intensity and seriousness with which they loved, trained and exercised those animals had (for the time being, at least) replaced some of the other possibilities, and certainly other relationships, in their lives. Although there was nothing sexual about their friendship, it was in many crucial ways a love affair. Here were all the markers of a lifelong passion: their initial wariness of each other (they'd met at a party a few years earlier but had hardly hit it off); their shy, outdoor courtship ("Let's take the long way home," Knapp would say after a walk, so they could chat some more in the car); and finally Caldwell's touchingly naked declaration, not far into the friendship, of "Oh no - I need you." When Caldwell eventually manages to buy a house, it's both amusing and somehow inevitable that Knapp rushes up and hoists her "like a sack of grain" over the threshold. All the best qualities of the happiest and most resilient marriages are here. The in-jokes that no one else will get. The women's willingness to take each other's fears and neuroses seriously while at the same time gently demolishing them. The constant, fervent competition ("We named the cruel inner taskmaster we each possessed the Inner Marine") tempered with the kinder knowledge that "when it came to matters of the soul and the psyche, we each knew how to tend to the other." And the fact that both women ultimately shared and feared the "empty room in the heart that is the essence of addiction." But this was to be a romance without a happy ending. We learn right from the start that Knapp fell gravely ill with Stage IV lung cancer at 42, and that she had a sickeningly swift death. Maybe more startling, her dying doesn't even form the book's real dramatic climax. We're still well short of the end when Caldwell grapples with "the suck and force of death," sitting in Knapp's cold and empty living room: "Here, in all its subcomfort temperatures and museumlike stillness, was Caroline, gone." Caldwell fills her final chapters with an event you would never predict. And though it is apparently unrelated, this terrifyingly apposite episode was so shocking (to me, anyway) that I won't spoil its impact by even hinting at it. Yet it summons the dead woman's spirit in a way no amount of reflective deathbed writing ever could, and left me intensely moved. This demolition of expectations is another strength of Caldwell's narrative. Long after the grief and dust have settled, a single joyful scene stays in my mind. The two women are laughing together, rolling around on the forest floor, attempting to train their dogs - "pack of four, we were, planting flags all over the province of our rearranged lives" - and Caldwell looks at Knapp and says, "You know - after all this, I don't think that any man could ever treat me badly again." This may be a book about death and loss, but Caldwell's greatest achievement is to rise above all that to describe both the very best that women can be together and the precious things they can, if they wish, give back to one another: power, humor, love and self-respect. This friendship had all the markers of lifelong passion: a wary meeting, a courtship, a naked declaration of need. Julie Myerson's latest book is "The Lost Child."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 15, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
Caldwell, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic, reflected on her Texas heritage and literary ardor in her first gorgeously crafted memoir, A Strong West Wind (2006). Her second, a gripping mix of confession, elegy, and resolve, focuses on Caldwell's profound friendship with sister writer Caroline Knapp. One would expect the two independent women to have met in literary circles in the 1990s: both lived in Cambridge, both wrote for newspapers Caldwell reviewing books for the Boston Globe, Knapp writing a column for an alternative paper. Instead it was their love for dogs (Clementine, Caldwell's beloved Samoyed, darn near steals the show), passion for the water (Caldwell as a swimmer, Knapp as a rower), and struggles with alcoholism that brought them together. Knapp confronted her addiction in Drinking: A Love Story (1996). Caldwell kept her trials to herself until now. Interweaving her vivid memories of Knapp, who died unexpectedly at age 42 in 2001, with tales sweet and harrowing of her own efforts to overcome fear and embrace life, Caldwell creates an adroitly distilled memoir of trust, affinity, and love.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Caldwell (A Strong West Wind) has managed to do the inexpressible in this quiet, fierce work: create a memorable offering of love to her best friend, Caroline Knapp, the writer (Drinking: A Love Story) who died of lung cancer at age 42 in 2002. The two met in the mid-1990s: "Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived." Both single, writers (Caldwell was then book critic for the Boston Globe), and living alone in the Cambridge area, the two women bonded over their dog runs in Fresh Pond Reservoir, traded lessons in rowing (Knapp's sport) and swimming (Caldwell's), and shared stories, clothes, and general life support as best friends. Moreover, both had stopped drinking at age 33 (Caldwell was eight years older than her friend); both had survived early traumas (Caldwell had had polio as a child; Knapp had suffered anorexia). Their attachment to each other was deeply, mutually satisfying, as Caldwell describes: "Caroline and I coaxed each other into the light." Yet Knapp's health began to falter in March 2002, with stagefour lung cancer diagnosed; by June she had died. Caldwell is unflinching in depicting her friend's last days, although her own grief nearly undid her; she writes of this desolating time with tremendously moving grace. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Caldwell has penned a loving ode to a lost friend, Caroline Knapp, author of Drinking: A Love Story. Caldwell chronicles the friendship, from their first meeting to Knapp's death from lung cancer. The two women are truly soul sisters, with shared interests (dogs, hiking) and similar life paths (solitude, writing, surviving alcoholism). This meditation on friendship and grief is heartfelt and eloquent but perhaps would have worked better as a long essay or article.-Lauren Gilbert, Cold Spring Harbor Lib. & Environmental Ctr., NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A Pulitzer Prizewinning author's heartfelt memoir of her midlife friendship with a fellow writer.Caldwell, then book-review editor for the Boston Globe, and Caroline Knapp, a columnist for the Boston Phoenix, connected in 1996, when their love of their dogs, Clementine and Lucille, brought them together in a meadow near Boston. Besides writing and dogs, the two women had much in common, including athleticism, health problems, a history of alcoholism and belief in the value of psychodynamic therapy. Caldwell, some eight or nine years older than Knapp, devotes a sizable chunk of this volume to an account of her long struggle with alcoholism and her recovery from it. Knapp had previously published a memoir titled Drinking: A Love Story. These two brainy, independent women, both somewhat introverted loners, spent hours outdoors together, walking, talking, exercising their beloved dogs, rowing and swimming. Knapp, a devoted rower, trained Caldwell in that skill, and Caldwell taught Knapp to become a good swimmer. Each admired the prowess of the other and strove to achieve it. When time allowed, they vacationed together, sometimes with Knapp's boyfriend along, sometimes with just their loyal dogs. Caldwell writes with deep feeling, but without sentimentality, about the life-altering friendship they formed. Unfortunately, it was short-lived. In April 2002, Knapp was diagnosed with incurable lung cancer, and less than two months later she died. The story of that final illness and of Caldwell's grief at losing her best friend is a poignant and powerful.Will resonate with women readers of all ages, who, if they are dog lovers, will be doubly moved.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
