Let's Take the Long Way Home

by Gail Caldwell

  ON A BRIGHT, HOT day at the end of summer, I got on a plane not to Paris but to Baltimore, on a mission more circuitous and less glamorous than a trip to the Louvre. I rented a car at the Baltimore airport and started driving from Maryland across rural Pennsylvania, on my way to meet a breeder of Samoyeds whose dogs I had seen a decade before. That part of the state has a rustic, southern feel, full of back roads and green, rolling hills, with barn stars on half the houses. I had been up since dawn and was alone and half lost, wondering what in the hell I was doing on a lonely stretch of Pennsylvania when I might have been in Italy, say, or Montana, or the south of France. I passed a small highway marker, as discreet as a street sign, that read MASON DIXON LINE, and my heart fluttered in response.

  Just beyond the marker, on the other side of the road, was a seedy-looking liquor store with a purple neon sign. I traveled a lot when I was a drinker—alcohol gave me the high-octane courage to go anywhere—and wherever I landed, the first thing I did, had to do, was find the nearest liquor store. I always pretended it was a mission of desire, but it felt like a prison sentence. When I drove past the store in Pennsylvania, its parking lot half full of cars in the early afternoon, I had a flash of what it had been like to have to do that, to locate the place that warehoused my bottle of hope.

  But the store with its flashing light—LIQUOR—also reminded me of something else from years before that nearly made me laugh aloud. When I was growing up in Texas, whenever a fellow was going to the liquor store or stepping out to the car to have a snort, the colloquial expression was “I’ve got to see a man about a dog.” Now here I was, so many miles and decades later, sober and heartsore and still alive, and I really did have to see someone about a dog. She was part of a litter that had been born in June, and though I hadn’t laid eyes on her, I had already named her: Tula, a wonderful old southern name I’d always loved. I had searched out the name’s origins and loved it even more. Tula was from the Sanskrit for “balance,” or from “tulayati,” meaning “to lift up.”

  The clouds ran on ahead of me and I crossed into Gettysburg, a place of such sacred ground and memory that it threw my own life into the panoramic mist where it belonged. I drove into the military park and onto the old battlegrounds, and I stopped at the cemetery long enough to pay my respects. Then I got back in the car and kept on going.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MY EDITOR, KATE MEDINA, UNDERSTOOD THE VISION of this book from its conception; my thanks are on every page. Louise Erdrich, darkling sister, was invaluable as both writer and friend. My agent, Lane Zachary, offered her usual blend of enthusiasm and Buddhist calm. Andrea Cohen, poet and jokester, reminded me always of the seriousness of humor.

  The emotional staying power I needed to tell this story came from many sources. For their grace and kindness, within the story itself and to me afterward, my great thanks and love to Mark Morelli, Sandra Shea, Rebecca Knapp, and David Herzog.

  My home fires were tended by an exceptional group of friends: Peter and Pat Wright, Kathy and Leo De Natale, Avery Rimer, Rick Weissbourd, Peter James, Marjorie Gatchell, Eliza Gagnon, Louisa Williams, and the Saturday night gang. Amy Kantor and Beth Shepherd took care of me in every way. I know it would make Caroline happy that this list is so long and full. Finally, my love and gratitude to Dick Chasin, who knew the depth of my grief as well as the journey through it.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  GAIL CALDWELL was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism in 2001. She is the former chief book critic of The Boston Globe and the author of A Strong West Wind. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  Discussion Questions for

  Let’s Take the Long Way Home

  Discussion Questions for Let’s Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell

  1. The book’s subtitle is “A Memoir of Friendship.” Why it is not simply “A Memoir,” and what does this say about the book as a whole? Whose story, at heart, would you say this is?

  2. Caldwell writes, “Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived.” She goes on to describe their “tatting center,” and the secret codes that tied their lives together. To what degree do you think the strength of a friendship depends on being able to disappear into an imaginary world together, to develop a secret code that only the friends understand? How do you see this playing out in Let’s Take the Long Way Home? What about in your own life?

  3. Gail and Caroline have a great deal in common, but they also have very different personalities. There is a darker edge to their friendship, too: Caldwell calls it a “swampland,” “the world of envy and rivalry and self-doubt,” the competitiveness between the two women in their writing, on the water, and in life. In what ways are they similar, and in what ways different? Do you think these elements strengthen or weaken their bond?

  4. Both Gail and Caroline have relationships with men, and yet the core of their friendship seems to contain a singular intimacy of the kind that exists between women. Does that bond call to mind friendships or relationships in your own life?

  5. In a scene on the Harvard University sports fields, Caldwell says, “We used to laugh that people with common sense or without dogs were somewhere in a warm restaurant, or traveling, or otherwise living the sort of life that all of us think, from time to time, that we ought to be living or at least desiring.” One of the things Gail and Caroline discuss in the course of their friendship is whether they are “living their lives correctly”—whether they are taking full advantage of the time they have. Do you think there is a “correct” way to live, and if so, what do you think should dictate the priorities? Is it realistic to try to avoid wasting time, or is that necessary to “correct living”? Do you think Let’s Take the Long Way Home offers any kind of answer to this question?

  6. “What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part.” What do you think Caldwell means by this?

  7. In what ways does Clementine’s arrival change Gail’s life, on both a practical and an emotional level? She compares dog ownership to having children, but makes the point that “this mysterious, intelligent animal I had brought into my life seemed to me not a stand-in, but a blessing.”

  8. As the author is struggling to overcome her alcoholism, she has two conversations that help change the way she sees the world and her experiences. In one, a therapist tells her that “If … I could keep only one thing about you, it would be your too-muchness.” Later, her alcoholism counselor, Rich, says, “Don’t you know? The flaw is the thing we love.” Do you agree? Can you think of examples, in the book or in your own life, that prove or disprove these ideas?

  9. Let’s Take the Long Way Home doesn’t have a memoir’s traditional, chronological narrative structure. How do you think this contributes to the effect and emotional impact of the book overall? Does it reflect the nature of the friendship itself? Could Caldwell have told her story any other way?

  10. Do you see Gail, as a character, change in the course of the book—having discovered, and then lost, both Caroline and Clementine? What would you say she has gained?

  11. Caldwell tells a moving anecdote about using the “alpha roll” while she is training Clementine. It is a technique meant to establish the dog owner’s authority, but it doesn’t work at all on the mischievous puppy; as she continues to try and fail, Caldwell suddenly sees a parallel between her own childhood relationship with her father and senses that the whole approach is wrong. “From that moment on, everything changed between us. Wherever I danced, she followed.” What lessons might we all learn from this story?

  12. Loss is at the center of the book—we know from the first several pages that Caroline will die—and Caldwell writes about the new world without Caroline in it, where she experienced rage and despair and “the violence of time itself.” Does her description of grief mirror any of your own experiences?

  13. Caroline and Gail have a private g
ame in which they assign a dog breed to each person they know. For fun, what kind of dog would you be? What about your best friend? Your worst enemy?

  Visit www.LetsTaketheLongWayHome.com to share your thoughts about this book, watch a special video, and view photos of Gail and Caroline.

  You’ve read about Gail and Caroline’s friendship in Let’s Take the Long Way Home.

  Now read Caroline Knapp’s revealing memoir, Drinking.

  Also available from The Random House Publishing Group:

  A Strong West Wind by Gail Caldwell

  Pack of Two by Caroline Knapp

  This is a work of nonfiction, however the names of some individuals involved have been changed in order to disguise their identities. Any resulting resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.

  Copyright © 2010 by Gail Caldwell

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Caldwell, Gail.

  Let’s take the long way home : a memoir of friendship / Gail Caldwell.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-989-5

  1. Knapp, Caroline, 1959–2002—Friends and associates. 2. Caldwell, Gail—Friends and associates. 3. Journalists—United States—Biography. 4. Critics—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  PN4874.K575C35 2010

  070.92—dc22

  [B] 2009029384

  www.atrandom.com

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