As I was straightening some bookshelves this week, I came upon a new memoir: Let’s Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell. Everyone knows that I am a sucker for memoirs, especially sad ones, so I grabbed it and started reading. It is the story of a friendship between Gail Caldwell and Carolyn Knapp.

If Knapp’s name seems familiar to you, she wrote several bestselling memoirs a few years ago. Her most popular work was, Drinking: A Love Story, which was on the New York Times list for several months. Knapp was, as she put it, a ”high-functioning alcoholic” as well as an award-winning journalist and Ivy League graduate from a prominent New England family. She appeared to be a happy and successful young woman but drinking had slowly taken hold of her life. Sadly, she would die from lung cancer at the age of forty two.

Knapp and Caldwell met when they were middle aged and a unique friendship began. Both were writers who had struggled with alcohol and also shared a great love of books.

Gail Caldwell is chief book critic for the Boston Globe and in 2001 won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.  She opens her memoir with“It’s an old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that.” She also wrote, “Death is a cliche until you’re in it.’’ How true, how true.

This book begins with Knapp’s death but Caldwell chronologically unfolds the back story of their relationship; telling how Knapp was the perfect friend but even funnier and more interesting than one could have imagined. They shared a passion for dogs and spent many hours talking while taking their dogs on long walks.

“What they never tell you about grief,’’ Caldwell writes, “is that missing someone is the simple part.’’ Seemingly small things take on huge proportions. For instance, she can’t force herself to throw out her set of keys to Knapp’s house. “These are keys to locks and doors that no longer exist, and I keep them in my glove compartment, where they have been moved from one car to another in the past couple of years.’’

As one reviewer put it, “Maybe the story of Gail Caldwell and Caroline Knapp’s friendship is an old story. But it is also a holy story. A familiar yet emotionally complex story that can bring a reader to tears.” For sure. -Norma

Share