Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship by Gail Caldwell; These Precious Days by Ann Patchett

2010 Random House; 2021 Harper

People read books for all sorts of reasons. Frequently it’s for entertainment or escape, but just as often it can be a means of inquiry, to learn more about the world and the people in it.

I often find myself reading memoirs, seeking insight into an author’s writing life. I want to understand, for example, how some authors manage to sit and work for hours each day, week after week, month after month, year after year, knocking out a respectable number of books over a writing lifetime, while other would-be authors avoid the blank page as if it were the plague. What stops them? Is it the solitary nature of the endeavor? Difficulty of the task?

Writing, no doubt, can be a slog, an ascent up a hill of sand. En route, it’s easy to tire, get lost. Not knowing where to go, circling endlessly, it’s easy to give up. Productivity, which requires swaths of solitude and large measures of grit, can be elusive. Writers, however, persist.

I am often startled to discover that some produce not only a prodigious body of work, but are, in addition, well-adjusted people with partners and well-run households.

What, then, are the ingredients that feed a balanced and thriving writing life?

Ann Patchett’s most recent book of essays, These Precious Days (2021) illuminates one such life, gently pulling aside the curtain on an enormous talent. Patchett’s long-time marriage to a surgeon, dedication to fitness and vegetarianism, her excellent cooking and committed housekeeping all form a welcoming backdrop to a home life that includes hosting friends and fellow writers for dinners, overnights, and longer stays. Balancing that along with writing 20 exceptional books, not to mention co-ownership in a Nashville bookstore, she leaves me awestruck.

This collection of 23 essays reflects Patchett's thoughts on her husband's obsession with piloting small aircraft, knitting, her best friend from childhood, not having children, her three fathers, and her love of the writers Eudora Welty and Kate DeCamillo, among other topics.

For me, reading an essay by Patchett is like spending time with a great friend and gaining more insight into what propels her through life. At one time it was knitting. Patchett does not drink and managed to quit smoking by taking up knitting, but eventually she gave that up too, because "you can't be a knitter and a novelist."

Order has always been a driving force for Patchett. She claims that the chief reason people loved hiring her as a babysitter was that she cleaned and tidied up the house while they had date night. 

Reading about the lives of writers is, no doubt, a niche interest, but for those so inclined, Let’s Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship, written by Gail Caldwell, is a worthwhile choice.

Caldwell, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic, published the volume about her friendship with fellow writer Caroline Knapp, author of the best-seller Drinking: A Love Story, in 2010. The two had met through a mutual friend in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they both lived. They soon bonded over dogs, a love of books, the outdoors, and their respective sports: swimming (Caldwell) and rowing (Knapp.)

Caldwell and Knapp came from very different backgrounds but had deeply connected interests. Knapp grew up in Cambridge, the daughter of a famous psychiatrist, while Caldwell was born in the Texas Panhandle. Despite beginnings set widely apart, many common threads bound them together. Quitting drinking was a big part of their shared history, though each gave up alcohol separately, before they knew one another. Knapp's account of her addiction turned into the memoir Drinking: A Love Story, a 1996 New York Times bestseller.

In addition to sobriety, the friends had others things in common; each started out her career as a columnist in Boston. Both were dedicated athletes. They were each deeply attached to their dogs. (By way of illustrating her own canine predilection, Caldwell remarks that on one occasion, her dinner party hosts were disappointed to find her in the backyard playing with the family dog rather than rubbing elbows with the gathered elite, but surely any dog-loving introvert understands her preference.)

Let’s Take the Long Way Home is the study of both a friendship and the rhythms of two lives revolving around simple routines. Both women wrote in the morning and telephoned one another in the afternoon once finished, often walking their dogs together afterward. Both rowed regularly on the Charles River, from boathouses some five miles distant.

Of course, more than dog-walking takes place in the story. Caldwell buys a house; Knapp gets married. Knapp teaches Caldwell to row, and Caldwell schools Knapp on distance swimming. Eventually Knapp becomes mortally ill. The story lens, however, ever focuses on how the friendship sustains these two people, helping them inhabit the life they were meant to live. Sadly, in 2002, Knapp, 10 years her friend’s junior, dies of lung cancer at the age of 43. 

Before Knapp became ill, Caldwell, the elder of the pair, often teased Knapp, saying she expected her, the younger writer, to provide Caldwell with nutritious soups in Caldwell’s dotage. With Knapp now long gone, readers will hope that the friendship itself continues to sustain Caldwell. We know that she continues to write. In addition to Let’s Take the Long Way Home, Caldwell has published three additional memoirs: Bright Precious Thing: Reflections Based on a Life of Feminism (2020); New Life, No Instructions (2013); and her first, Strong West Wind: A Memoir (2006).

Reading Let’s Take the Long Way Home (I borrowed the 206-page large print edition from my public library) felt like spending an extended long weekend with the two writers — walking Caldwell's Samoyed, Clementine, and Knapp's dog, Lucille, at a pond near Cambridge, Massachusetts. I thought of my dog, considered taking up rowing and moving somewhere writerly.

The unwitting writing lesson of Let’s Take the Long Way Home is: Live somewhere you love; write all morning; take your dog on lots of walks; participate in an outdoor sport every day; and have a friend you can interact with on a daily basis.

Ann Patchett’s formula? I don’t know. Whatever Wonder Woman does?