Speaking with Strangers
by Mary Cantwell
From the author of American Girl, a "profoundly moving" memoir of single motherhood, loneliness, and finding one's way home (New York Times). 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...