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

 In 2010, Gail Caldwell, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic, wrote Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship about her relationship with the writer Caroline Knapp. The two met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they both lived, and bonded over dogs, a love of books, and the outdoors, as well as their respective sports: swimming (Caldwell) and rowing (Knapp.)

The friends came from very different backgrounds but had deeply connected interests. Knapp grew up in Cambridge, the daughter of a famous psychiatrist, while Caldwell was born in the Texas Panhandle. Despite beginnings set widely apart, many common threads bound them together. Quitting drinking was a big part of their shared history, though each gave up alcohol separately, before they knew one another. Knapp's account of her addiction turned into the memoir Drinking: A Love Story, a 1996 New York Times bestseller.

In addition to sobriety, the friends each started out their careers as columnists in Boston. Both were both deeply attached to their dogs. By way of illustrating her canine predilection, Caldwell remarks that on one occasion, her dinner party hosts were disappointed to find her in the backyard playing with the family dog rather than rubbing elbows with the gathered elite— the obvious choice for a dog-loving introvert.

Let’s Take the Long Way Home is the study of an intense friendship and the rhythms of two lives revolving around simple routines. Both women wrote in the morning and telephoned one another in the afternoon once finished, often walking their dogs together afterward. Both rowed regularly on the Charles River, from boathouses some five miles distant.

Reading this short work, (I borrowed the 206-page large print edition from my public library), made me feel as if I were spending an extended long weekend in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the two writers, walking Caldwell's beloved Samoyed, Clementine, and Knapp's dog, Lucille at the nearby pond.

Of course, more than dog-walking takes place in the story. Caldwell buys a house; Knapp gets married. Knapp teaches Caldwell to row, and Caldwell schools Knapp on distance swimming. Knapp becomes ill. The story lens, however, ever focuses on how the friendship sustains these two people, helping them inhabit the life they were meant to live.

Sadly, in 2002, Knapp, 10 years her friend’s junior, died of lung cancer at the age of 43. 

In addition to Let’s Take the Long Way Home, Caldwell has published three other memoirs: Bright Precious Thing: Reflections Based on a Life of Feminism (2020); New Life, No Instructions (2013); and her first, Strong West Wind: A Memoir (2006). I suspect that I will pick up Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story soon.