Speaking With Strangers Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Speaking With Strangers Book

In her first memoir, An American Girl , Mary Cantwell recounts how as a young woman growing up in the 1930s and 1940s she longed to escape her small town and experience something more exciting. She found her escape by moving to New York and building a successful career in the modeling industry. Her second memoir, Manhattan, When I Was Young, is a sparkling account of those New York days and nights. In her third memoir, Speaking with Strangers, Cantwell has come full circle and again longs to escape and experience something new. The breakdown of her marriage and her father's death left Cantwell feeling isolated and disconnected, craving new intimacies to compensate for the ones she had lost. Traveling on photographic assignments gave Cantwell the opportunity to refresh her psyche and forge new bonds. Through a series of minitravel vignettes, Cantwell constructs colorful characterizations of the eclectic gathering of characters she encounters from all corners of the world. From Australian sheep ranchers and Russian soldiers to novelists and ministers, strangers enter and exit Cantwell's life absorbing her into conversations. Yet Cantwell realizes that traveling provides a "peculiar intimacy of people who will never see each other again," and we are left feeling that she will never find the intimacy for which she longs. This is Cantwell's most revealing memoir yet, in which she provides extremely personal reflections on family, friends, and her inner-self.Read More

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  • Product Description

    From the author of American Girl and Manhattan When I Was Young, a searingly honest portrait of single motherhood, loneliness, and finding one's way home.

    The concluding volume in Mary Cantwell's autobiographical trilogy finds her newly divorced and ready to escape life in New York and the demands of single parenthood. Traveling on assignment to some of the remotest and least glamorous corners of the globe, Cantwell is scared, lonely, and depressed--and she vows never to leave her children again if God will just get her out of this latest hellhole. Yet the farther she rambles, the more solace she finds in the company of strangers. She also finds deep, if passing, happiness in a relationship with "the balding man," a famous writer, and warmth and hilarity in her friendship with the legendary novelist Frederick Exley. Imbued with a sensibility as distinct as the city Cantwell calls home, this strikingly candid memoir offers readers another fascinating glimpse into the life of a woman with one foot in the past and the other, warily, in her present.

    "Profoundly moving, unforgettable . . . Cantwell makes you discover yourself." --The New York Times

    "Writing in a style as crisp and fresh as clean white sheets, Cantwell's voice remains true throughout: amusing, prickly, sometimes reticent, never boring." --Mirabella

  • 0140283609
  • 9780140283600
  • Mary Cantwell
  • 1 July 1999
  • Penguin USA (P)
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 160
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