Gail Caldwell

Harvard Book Store is delighted to welcome back memoirist and former Boston Globe book critic GAIL CALDWELL for a reading from her memoir, Let′s Take the Long Way Home, newly out in paperback.

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.

In Let's Take the Long Way Home, Caldwell mines the deepest levels of devotion and grief in this moving memoir about treasuring and losing a best friend. It is a celebration of life and of the transformations that come from intimate connection.

"Caldwell's writing is serene, wry, and meditative, rather than raw, but even so, it's clear she lost one of the most important relationships in her life when Knapp died. . . . Anyone who's ever had that and lost it—or can imagine what it might feel like to lose it—will recognize how precious it is. The losing isn't the exceptional part of this story; everyone loses something, sooner or later. The wonder lies in finding it in the first place." —Salon

"Caldwell's book is more heartwarming than devastating. It's about the joys of friendship as much as the ravages of 'intolerable loss.' She evokes the sort of soul mate most of us yearn for. . . . Her memoir, a tribute to the enduring power of friendship, is a lovely gift to readers." —The Washington Post