Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

"I wanted the warmth of spontaneous connection and the freedom to be left alone." ~ Gail Caldwell

From the start of this profoundly beautiful story we know that Gail Caldwell loses her best friend Caroline Knapp. As she puts it so precisely, you can't "sidestep the cruelty of an intolerable loss." For about a third of this book the words were blurry because it is so moving. Just when I thought I had composed myself enough to read on, I cried again. Sometimes I'd read a sentence and reread it again and again because it was so true.

This is the story of two soul mates who love dogs, swimming and sculling. In some way it doesn't matter what they were doing, they just loved being together. After an outing they would find themselves both at home calling each other on the phone. Their friendship is deep, meaningful and essential!

There are some surprising details like how they both dated the same man. What are the chances of that happening? Then there is the fact that they both loved drinking at one point in their lives and overcame their addiction before meeting. Gail Caldwell talks briefly about her own drinking problem but mostly focuses on the friendship.

"Let's Take the Long Way Home" is a book that will work its way into your heart in ways few books ever will. I loved the warmth of Gail Caldwell's writing style and how she expresses such honest feelings in lucid prose. This is one of the best books I've read this year!

~The Rebecca Review

Gail Caldwell's memoir is a touching account of friendship that is brief but all encompassing. Although she and Caroline Knapp are only friends for seven years before Caroline is felled by lung cancer, the two built a relationship that is deeper than what's enjoyed by many blood relatives.

Their lives contained many similarities. Both women are childless, single writers and former alcoholics who initially bond over their dogs, but their relationship deepens to the point where Gail says it was easy to mistake them for sisters or lovers.

Both women are loners which makes it seem kind of unlikely that they would form this lasting friendship, but their relationship works because they respect each other's boundaries and both believed in confronting problems head-on instead of stewing in silence.

Gail's account of her years as a functional alcoholic are stark and poignant. In one particularly bad moment, she passes out in a drunken stupor and breaks four ribs. This doesn't stop her from drinking and she fashions a portable bar by attaching a bag of ice and a flask of liquor to her crutches. It takes her a long time to accept that she was in fact an alcoholic and needed help to stop drinking. And unlike Caroline who'd written a book about her drinking problem, Gail never really liked to discuss this part of her life and they had been friends for a while before she ever broached the subject.

But despite all their other similarities, it is their devotion to their dogs that dominates most of the story. These women love their animals and spent lots of time and money training and caring for them. Gail reckons that it's sort of a maternal bond that you have with someone who is completely dependent on you for your survival, but the incongruity is that Gail, who is reclusive after she gives up drinking, was afraid of anyone needing her that much or of her needing anyone else that much. She was even reluctant to call Caroline after she was involved in an accident that landed her in the hospital.

Gail's friendship with Caroline was a gift that allowed her to grow and become a more open person, and her loss also taught Gail some hard lessons about grief and sorrow. This book is truly a remarkable tale about the intersection of the lives of two kindred spirits.

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This beautiful memoir of friendship could only come from someone who has experienced an intimate emotional connection of the highest level with another human being. Gail Caldwell had that connection with fellow writer Caroline Knapp, then lost it when Knapp died shortly after being diagnosed with cancer.

I was consumed by Knapp's own memoir, Drinking: A Love Story many years ago. I remember reading of Knapp's death not long after that and feeling so pained by the fact that she had survived alcoholism only to be robbed of her life just a few years later. Caldwell's book was like finding a missing piece for me, an intimate look into the lives of Knapp and Caldwell and the tremendous friendship they wove together through walks in the woods, long summer vacations together and countless hours on the phone. A friendship that close changes lives forever, but neither was prepared for what lie ahead.

It seemed perverse almost, that fate would tear these two souls apart and Caldwell chronicles her private suffering with unrelenting candor and despair. Not only could I see the hole in her heart, her brilliant storytelling allowed me to feel it to some degree. That's the mark of excellence in a good memoir. Let's Take the Long Way Home doesn't just tell a story. It takes us along for a walk in the woods and like Caldwell, at journey's end, we're never the same.

Highly recommended, esp. after reading Knapp's memoir.

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If you have tears, prepare to shed them.

Caroline Knapp was the author of Drinking: A Love Story. I've wriiten about it on because some of you surely have issues with alcohol, and I thought it might be of use. And because it's acutely observed and beautifully written. And because there's a painful irony here: Caroline got sober, only to die in June of 2002, when she was forty-two, seven weeks after she was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer.

Caroline Knapp had a best friend. Gail Caldwell. Also a writer. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2001. She too had alcohol issues.

Two women writers. Both dog lovers. Both recovering alcoholics. Both living alone, and liking it. Both athletes. Near-neighbors in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Friends. Best friends. One died. The other wrote a book: "Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship." [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

There are men and women I love, and I think they know it, and I hope they know how incredibly lucky I feel that I'm in their lives, but we're talking about something else here, something deeper and more precious and, certainly, scarier.

"It's an old story," Caldwell begins. "I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that.''

Define everything. Well, rowing on the Charles River. Writing. Alcoholism. And, most of all, afternoon-long walk with their dogs:

"'Let's take the long way home,' she would say once we had gotten to the car, and then we would wend our way through the day traffic of Somerville or Medford, in no hurry to separate. At the end of the drive, with Clementine [Caldwell's dog] snoring softly in the back seat, we would sit outside the house of whoever was being dropped off, and keep talking. Then we would go inside our respective houses and call each other on the phone."

This is a grief memoir, but that descent into deepest sadness is also, by definition, an exploration of peak experiences. Everything's heightened, brighter, sharper in lives lived this acutely. This is a 190-page book --we don't get to Caroline's illness until page 125. What comes before? This great friendship, detailed. But also a condensed biography of Caroline Knapp. And a lacerating autobiography of Gail Caldwell:

"I've always remembered one thing Rich [Caldwell's AA adviser] said one day, when I was buried in fear and shame at the idea that I had drunk my way into alcoholism. He asked me why I was so frightened, and I told him, weeping, the first thing that came into my mind: "I'm afraid that no one will ever love me again." He leaned toward me with a smile of great kindness on his face, his hands clasped in front of him. "Don't you know?" he asked gently. "The flaw is the thing we love."

Eventually --you dread it --Caldwell gets to Caroline's fatal illness. The disbelief. The stoicism. And then, as Caroline begins her final descent, the combination of love and pride and hurt --the recognition moment of what there was and what will be lost.

"Near the end, I asked him [Caroline's former therapist] what he thought was happening, and he said, "Tell her everything you haven't said," and I smiled with relief. "There's nothing," I said. "I've already told her everything."

Can you imagine that? I can't.

I've always had a weakness for damaged women --they're so much more beautiful than the perfect ones. From her own book, I found Caroline Knapp to be ravishing. Now, here, I add Gail Caldwell.

What an astonishing friendship. What great women. What a stellar, unforgettable book.

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Let's Take The Long Way Home is, at its core, a love story. It's a story of how a close connection with a friend can ground us and provide us with a life worth living. And it's a story that any woman who has ever had a friend who is like a sister I count myself among those fortunate women will understand in a heartbeat.

Gail Caldwell, the Pulitzer Prize winning author, met Caroline Knapp, also a writer, over their mutual love of their dogs. Ms. 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."

Both women about a decade apart in age are passionate about writing and their dogs and have successfully dealt with alcohol addiction that knocked them to their knees. "We had a lot of dreams, some of them silly, all part of the private code shared by people who plan to be around for the luxuries of time," Ms. Caldwell shares.

Quickly, Gail and Caroline and their two dogs become a "pack of four". They are both self-described moody introverts who prefer the company of dogs. Yet, "...we gave each other wide berth it was far easier, we learned over the years, to be kind to the other than to ourselves." As they grow closer, Gail and Caroline learn that nurturance and strength "were each the lesser without the other."

It is almost inconceivable that this close friendship would ever end, but Caroline is a smoker and at 42, she learns she has stage 4 lung cancer. Her death comes quickly, in a matter of weeks. Gail Caldwell reflects, "Death is a divorce nobody asked for; to live through it is to find a way to disengage from what you thought you couldn't stand to lose." And later: "Caroline's death had left me with a great and terrible gift: how to live in a world where loss, some of it unbearable, is as common as dust or moonlight." Eventually, she comes to realize "...we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures."

This memoir is poignant, authentic, unflinching, and genuine never manipulative or sudsy. In addition to the profound look at an extraordinary friendship, it also focuses on "inter-species" love between two fiercely self-reliant woman and their dogs. The rich and moving portrayal of Gail Caldwell's Samoy, Clementine, will be entirely familiar to those of us who have shared our lives with four-legged "fur babies"; love in any guise is still love.

This eloquent book ends up being a celebration of life in all its complexities including love, friendship, devotion, and grief. As Gail Caldwell writes, "The real trick is to let life, with all its ordinary missteps and regrets, be consistently more mysterious and alluring than its end."

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