Let's Take the Long Way Home (Caldwell)

Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship
Gail Caldwell, 2010
Random House
208 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400067381


Summary
It’s an old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.
 
So begins this gorgeous memoir by Pulitzer Prize winner Gail Caldwell, a testament to the power of friendship, a story of how an extraordinary bond between two women can illuminate the loneliest, funniest, hardest moments in life, including the final and ultimate challenge.

They met over their dogs. Both writers, Gail Caldwell and Caroline Knapp, author of Drinking: A Love Story, became best friends, talking about everything from their shared history of a struggle with alcohol, to their relationships with men and colleagues, to their love of books. They walked the woods of New England and rowed on the Charles River, and the miles they logged on land and water became a measure of the interior ground they covered. From disparate backgrounds but with striking emotional similarities, these two private, fiercely self-reliant women created an attachment more profound than either of them could ever have foreseen. 

The friendship helped them define the ordinary moments of life as the ones worth cherishing. Then, several years into this remarkable connection, Knapp was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.

With her signature exquisite prose, Caldwell mines the deepest levels of devotion and grief in this moving memoir about treasuring and losing a best friend. Let’s Take the Long Way Home is a celebration of life and of the 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. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—1951
• Where—Amarillo, Texas, USA
• Education—University of Texas, Austin
• Awards—2001 Pulitizer Prize for Criticism
• Currently—lives in Cambridge, Massachesetts

Gail Caldwell was the chief book critic for the Boston Globe, where she was on staff from 1985 to 2009. Caldwell was the winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. The award was for eight Sunday reviews and two other columns written in 2000. According to the Pulitzer Prize board, those columns were noted for “her insightful observations on contemporary life and literature.”

Caldwell was born and raised in Amarillo, Texas, and at the age of 6 months caught polio. After graduating from Tascosa High School, she attended Texas Tech University for a while but transferred to University of Texas at Austin and obtained two degrees in American studies.

She was an instructor at the University of Texas until 1981. Before joining the the Boston Globe, Caldwell taught feature writing at Boston University, worked as the arts editor of the Boston Review and wrote for the publications, New England Monthly and Village Voice.

In 2006 Caldwell published the memoir, A Strong West Wind and in 2010 Let's Take The Long Way Home, a memoir of her friendship with author Caroline Knapp. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has a Samoyed named Tula. (From Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
(Editor's Choice.) Let’s Take the Long Way Home left me intensely moved.... Caldwell’s greatest achievement is to rise above [death and loss] 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.
Julie Myerson - New York Times Book Review

A tribute to the enduring power of friendship....You can shelve Let’s Take the Long Way Home...next to The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s searing memoir about losing her husband to heart failure.  But that’s assuming it makes it to your shelf: This is a book you’ll want to share with your own "necessary pillars of life," as Caldwell refers to her nearest and dearest.... A lovely gift to readers.
Washington Post

Stunning...gorgeous...intense and moving.... A book of such crystalline truth that it makes the heart ache.
Boston Globe

(Editor’s Choice.) Their relationship nurtured and inspired Caldwell and Knapp, and in reading about it, we feel enriched as well.
Chicago Tribune

A near-perfect memoir: beautiful, humble, intimate and filled with piercing insights.  Meant to be savored and shared.
Time

(Starred 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.
Publishers Weekly


[This] gripping mix of confession, elegy, and resolve focuses on Caldwell’s profound friendship with sister writer Caroline Knapp...who died unexpectedly at age 42 in 2001.... [W]ith 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. —Donna Seaman
Booklist

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.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions
1. The book’s subtitle is “A Memoir of Friendship.” Why it is not simply “A Memoir,” and what does this say about the book as a whole? Whose story, at heart, would you say this is?

2. Caldwell writes, “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.” She goes on to describe their “tatting center,” and the secret codes that tied their lives together. To what degree do you think the strength of a friendship depends on being able to disappear into an imaginary world together, to develop a secret code that only the friends understand? How do you see this playing out in Let’s Take the Long Way Home? What about in your own life?

3. Gail and Caroline have a great deal in common, but they also have very different personalities. There is a darker edge to their friendship, too: Caldwell calls it a “swampland,” “the world of envy and rivalry and self-doubt,” the competitiveness between the two women in their writing, on the water, and in life. In what ways are they similar, and in what ways different? Do you think these elements strengthen or weaken their bond?

4. Both Gail and Caroline have relationships with men, and yet the core of their friendship seems to contain a singular intimacy of the kind that exists between women. Does that bond call to mind friendships or relationships in your own life?

5. In a scene on the Harvard University sports fields, Caldwell says, “We used to laugh that people with common sense or without dogs were somewhere in a warm restaurant, or traveling, or otherwise living the sort of life that all of us think, from time to time, that we ought to be living or at least desiring.” One of the things Gail and Caroline discuss in the course of their friendship is whether they are “living their lives correctly”—whether they are taking full advantage of the time they have. Do you think there is a “correct” way to live, and if so, what do you think should dictate the priorities? Is it realistic to try to avoid wasting time, or is that necessary to “correct living”? Do you think Let’s Take the Long Way Home offers any kind of answer to this question?

6. “What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part.” What do you think Caldwell means by this?

7. In what ways does Clementine’s arrival change Gail’s life, on both a practical and an emotional level? She compares dog ownership to having children, but makes the point that “this mysterious, intelligent animal I had brought into my life seemed to me not a stand-in, but a blessing.”

8. As the author is struggling to overcome her alcoholism, she has two conversations that help change the way she sees the world and her experiences. In one, a therapist tells her that “If…I could keep only one thing about you, it would be your too-muchness.” Later, her alcoholism counselor, Rich, says, “Don’t you know? The flaw is the thing we love.” Do you agree? Can you think of examples, in the book or in your own life, that prove or disprove these ideas?

9. Let’s Take the Long Way Home doesn’t have a memoir’s traditional, chronological narrative structure. How do you think this contributes to the effect and emotional impact of the book overall? Does it reflect the nature of the friendship itself? Could Caldwell have told her story any other way?

10. Do you see Gail, as a character, change in the course of the book—having discovered, and then lost, both Caroline and Clementine? What would you say she has gained?

11. Caldwell tells a moving anecdote about using the “alpha roll” while she is training Clementine. It is a technique meant to establish the dog owner’s authority, but it doesn’t work at all on the mischievous puppy; as she continues to try and fail, Caldwell suddenly sees a parallel between her own childhood relationship with her father and senses that the whole approach is wrong. “From that moment on, everything changed between us. Wherever I danced, she followed.” What lessons might we all learn from this story?

12. Loss is at the center of the book—we know from the first several pages that Caroline will die—and Caldwell writes about the new world without Caroline in it, where she experienced rage and despair and “the violence of time itself.” Does her description of grief mirror any of your own experiences?

13. Caroline and Gail have a private game in which they assign a dog breed to each person they know. For fun, what kind of dog would you be? What about your best friend? Your worst enemy?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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