Gail Caldwell

I love Gail Caldwell.

I first realized this while reading Let’s Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship, which is about the death of her best friend, fellow memoirist Caroline Knapp. (You can read that review here. Or the review of Caroline’s memoir here.) She just seems so down-to-earth, wise, insightful. She’s overcome her share of hardships. She’s interesting. As I believe I mentioned in my review of Let’s Take the Long Way Home, I feel I have a lot in common with Gail. show more Both lovers of books, dogs, and solitude, I think in a different life we would have been good friends.

I wasn’t sure what New Life, No Instructions was about; the flap text was very vague and danced around the book’s actual premise without stating it directly. So, I’ll tell you here: this memoir is about Gail’s hip replacement surgery. Which, to be honest, does sound less than exciting when I say it like that. But the story is about much more than that: her childhood polio; her new dog, Tula; her mother; her rowing. It’s a beautiful memoir about support systems, human-canine relationships, physical decline, and healing. It’s about reorienting yourself, your perspective, and your life when things change–when you get a new dog, when you lose a friend or a parent, or when your bum leg is lengthened.

It doesn’t matter if you’re sixty years old and getting your own hip replaced or twenty-five with perfect joints; there’s something in this memoir for everyone. show less

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, I never quote parts of books but that one opening sentence convinced me that not only did I have to read this book but that it was going to touch a special cord with me. It made me instantly think of a friend that means the world to me. Gail Caldwell calls this book "a memoir of friendship" and so it is. It's the story of Gail and her friend, Caroline, who became friends show more because of their shared love for their dogs and who came to mean the world to each other. Caroline gets cancer and dies and it becomes the story of how Gail survives her friend's death.


I loved this story. It was a beautiful testament to the author's friend and to friendship period. I bawled my eyes out. Not because the story was so sad but because a part of me fears the day that I have to live through the death of one of my friends. show less

Let's Take the Long Way Home is a memoir that covers less than a decade of Gail Caldwell's career and personal life. Gail is a writer's writer and she's lived a writer's life. She's the former chief book critic for The Boston Globe where she wrote for more than 20 years. With a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism (2001), this is not her first memoir and it's not so much about her as it is about her friend Caroline and their friendship based on the bonds of their canine companions. Caroline Knapp show more (the author of Drinking: A Love Story) became Gail's neighbor, dog walking buddy, and friend; they shared their love of books. Knapp was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer and dies.

"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 Caldwell opens her real life story.

They met over their dogs. Gail learned to row and Caroline to swim because Gail swam and Caroline rowed. Two private, self-reliant writers came to be friends and this story is a memoir of true friendship.

"It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur and epiphany of one-way dialogue," (p. 123). Caldwell's use of timing -- the rhythms, beats and pacing of her prose -- keep most of the narrative in the "showing" -- the doing, the action. Yet when she "tells," she has something to say.

The story she tells is how to let the heart break open. "I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures. ...We tell the story to get them back, to capture the traces of footfalls through the snow." (p. 182) show less

I'm having a hard time framing a coherent review of this book. It's the story of a friendship that was intense and huge and that ended in death. I read, long ago, a memoir written by Knapp, who is the friend eulogized and remembered and celebrated herein. I recall liking that book a lot.

This one, though, was really hard. See, I had a friend with whom I was very close for a very long time, and then I moved across the country and though we always *said* we were going to live together when we show more were old, sometimes whole weeks would pass where we didn't talk. Then she got sick and in what seemed like a blinding rush, died. I was 3000 miles away and I should have been right there with her. So, yeah, reading this, which includes Caldwell being at Knapp's bedside during her sickness and death, was difficult.

The book is exceedingly well-written, grueling, evocative and ultimately kind of wise. Recommended. show less