Let's Take the Long Way Home

Starred review from May 24, 2010
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.

January 21, 2010
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

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2010
A Pulitzer Prize–winning 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.

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July 1, 2010
Caldwell, a Pulitzer Prizewinning 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 Caldwells 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 newspapersCaldwell reviewing books for the Boston Globe, Knapp writing a column for an alternative paper. Instead it was their love for dogs (Clementine, Caldwells 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)