Speaking with Strangers: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Mary Cantwell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 28, 1998

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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.

From Publishers Weekly

After chronicling her coming-of-age in American Girl, then her marriage and the birth of her two daughters in Manhattan When I Was Young, Cantwell concludes her trilogy of memoirs with this dark and unsparing account of the years following her divorce. As are her previous books, it's a curious blend of reticence and tell-all. Still bitter over her father's death, which she views as an abandonment of her, she obsessively assumes the blame for the failure of her marriage, doing daily emotional penance for both real and imagined sins. Cantwell embarks on a four-year-long love affair with a renowned writer to whom she refers as "the balding man" (readers are likely to recognize poet James Dickey). Married and a womanizer, he is presented here as a man of cruelty masked by an oily Southern charm; the relationship seems more manipulative than loving. After the death of his wife, he teases and torments Cantwell with the promise of marriage; later a friend informs her that he has married a student. However agonizing the betrayal, it also becomes a form of absolution for Cantwell: "I have paid the penance for failing my husband." All is not Sturm und Drang, however. Cantwell paints a hilariously wicked portrait of writer Frederick Exley, whom she visits in Hawaii while on a magazine assignment; the late rock critic Lillian Roxon, who became a confidant, is treated with warmth and affection. Passionate about words and books, she still remembers exactly what she was reading on the travel assignments that took her to Russia, Turkey and Tashkent, where she often found herself "speaking with strangers." What is most striking about Cantwell's memoir is the glory of the language and her powers of observation. She brings her memories of a time and place into such clear focus that readers will find themselves not only sharing her memories but wandering through their own. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 142 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin; 1ST edition (April 28, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395827515
• ISBN-13: 978-0395827512
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,484,065 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Still flawed but human, June 23, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (NYC, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Speaking with Strangers: A Memoir (Hardcover)

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 buckling walls...But Fred's house was never totally consumed, and I, who was always frozen, had become used to warming my hands at its heat."

By its title, Speaking With Strangers promises the "peculiar intimacy of people who will never see each other again." And a few strangers do stay with us: the dancing Russian soldiers in Tashkent who share their vodka and horsemeat shishkebab; the Turkish tour guide with whom Mary squats, laughing and holding her nose, in an ancient latrine. But it is the homefront struggles of a lonely, working mother that are most compelling.

At times one wants to shake Mary for cabbing it uptown for another humiliating evening with the balding man, or for passively watching her young daughters' tears fall as she heads again for JFK. But in the end, her expressions of loss and success are everywoman's. And while we don't for a second buy her final sentence-that New York is her "true bridegroom"-we can forgive her. Like mo! st of us, she is still working it all out.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Everything good that you're read about it is true, June 6, 1998

By 

Eileen Galen (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Speaking with Strangers: A Memoir (Hardcover)

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.

0 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Overrated; good for limited audience only; rating = 6, June 14, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Manhattan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Speaking with Strangers: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Generally good, but overrated. Perhaps I would have enjoyed the book more if I had read the previous two (Manhattan When I was Young etc.). Did not think there was much flow throughout and Mary Cantwell certainly didn't inspire or go straight to my heart such as Lindbergh's "Gift From the Sea". Good if you've got nothing else to read.