I knew I would like this book, Let’s Take the Long Way Home, because it’s about a friendship between two women that was deep and marvelous (the book and the women). Carolyn Knapp’s book Drinking: A Love Story was a revelation, and I wondered after finishing it however many years ago ‘how it ended.’ Reader, she died. Of cancer at the age of 42.
The memoir of the friendship between these two writers, both of them recovered alcoholics as well as passionate dog-owners, rowers, swimmers, oddballs is wonderful. The writing is quiet and strong, and limns their history without revealing too much. Enough is told to reveal the commitment, intimacy and richness of their relationship without inviting sentimentality – always a danger in writing or telling a story that involves loss, death, love. It is a perfect illustration of Rilke’s definition of love as “standing guard over one another’s solitude.”
I laughed in self-recognition, in solidarity and affection. And I wept. Not at Caroline’s death, or with the author in her loss; there is a powerfully told episode towards the end of the book about Caldwell’s dog – one of those vignettes where you can feel the hairs rising on the back of your neck as the story progresses. And I am not a dog person.
