Speaking with Strangers

by Mary Cantwell

Book Overview

From the author of American Girl and Manhattan When I Was Young comes a searingly honest portrait of single motherhood, loneliness, and finding one's way home. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0395827515
• ISBN13: 9780395827512
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 142 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.9" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Still flawed but human

The frustrating thing about Mary Cantwell's recent memoir, Speaking With Strangers, is her inability to lean from her past. Cantwell, a former editor and travel writer at Mademoiselle and Vogue, jumps at every travel assignment to Turkey, Siberia and other distant lands in order to escape her broken marriage and two unhappy daughters. Once abroad, alone in oftentimes unfriendly territory, she promises God she'll never leave her akids again if only He'll return her home safely. Back in New York, though, confronting the stresses of single motherhood, she quickly abandons her girls again to "speak with strangers."With these strangers, Cantwell seems most authentically herself. Though she calls New York her "true bridegroom," it is when she is alone in foreign territory that she loses an oftentimes paralyzing insecurity and girlish dependence on her married lover, known only as "the balding man."Cantwell's insecurity is revealed in her first two books, American Girl, about growing up in Bristol, Rhode Island in the '30s and '40s, and Manhattan, When I Was Young. The death of her beloved father when she was 20 and her marriage soon after to a paternal and hypercritical man left her unable to rely on her own judgment. Her young husband chooses her clothing, her reading material and her friends. (After their divorce, where Speaking With Strangers picks up, she safely rebels against her ex by choosing a best friend of whom he would surely disapprove.) Instead of learning from her experiences, however, Cantwell later takes up with the balding man, a seflish, alcoholic writer who eventually leaves Mary for one of his students.Still, her long-term affair does allow Mary glimpses of self-knowledge. Of strict Catholic upbringing, Mary is surprised to find herself a willing partner not only in adultery but also in sexual role play and fantasy. "For the balding man," she writes, "I became a teller of tales of Great Danes and girls' reform schools and female war! ders and whippings and frightened virgins on all fours...Once I would have felt degraded by my nasty, nimble tongue, but not now. Telling stories to him so that he could make love didn't seem all that different from telling stories to my chidlren so that they could sleep." Like the thrill of travel, the excitement of her affair substitutes for deeper satisfactions.Although she worked with famous authors and designers for decades in New York City (she is now on the editorial board of the New York Times), Cantwell is, thankfully, not a name dropper. In addition, to disguising her lover and her two daughters by calling them "Snow White" and "Rose Red," Cantwell's anecdotes of the late novelist Frederick Exley and eccentric critic Lillian Roxon are not mere decorations; they depict close attachments that had a deep impact on the author's life.Of Exley she writes, "he attracted friends for much the same reason a burning building attracts spectators. We were mesmerized by the flames and falling rafters and bu

Everything good that you're read about it is true

Unsentimental, searingly honest, wryly funny, and very, very smart. Memoirists (and would-be memoirists) should study this book. Cantwell writes her life (this is the third volume) with a jaundiced eagle eye. She's been throught a lot of psychic pain, and describes it and much more. The particulars are interesting, the players - family, friends, an ex-husband, lovers - drawn sparely and precisely, and the message clear. A really great story, told by a terrific writer.