Speaking with Strangers

Mary Cantwell’s supple, seductive voice speaks out in her most revealing memoir, the conclusion of a trilogy about an American woman with one foot in her past and the other, warily, in her present. AMERICAN GIRL evoked the delights of her early youth in a small New England town. MANHATTAN WHEN I WAS YOUNG told of her marriage and children, her blossoming career in New York, and the decline of that marriage. In SPEAKING WITH STRANGERS she finds herself alone: a single mother in the big city, bereft of her husband if bolstered by friends, professionally successful if personally sad.. She took to traveling, for “escape,” to far regions of the world on magazine assignments. While wandering through Izmir, Belgrade, Tashkent, she would promise herself never to leave her children again if God would just get her out of the latest hellhole. Yet the farther she rambled, the more she found herself taking on a shape again–by speaking with strangers. She also found deep, if passing, happiness in an intense relationship with a famous writer she calls “the balding man” and warmth and hilarity in her friendship with the legendarily reclusive–and rambunctious–novelist, Frederick Exley. In SPEAKING WITH STRANGERS Mary Cantwell renders a sensibility as vivid as the city of which she is, quite literally, a part. As this fiercely candid memoir ends, Cantwell realizes that she had long since “embraced my true bridegroom. That was the day I married New York.” And with that realization this maker of a family and a career comes fully into her own as a writer.