Speaking With Strangers

Rating:
Summary: Overrated; good for limited audience only; rating = 6
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Overrated; good for limited audience only; rating = 6
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Cantwell's memoir ,honest,or a conversation with a stranger?
Review: Mary Cantwells memoir Speaking with Strangers is written with what seems to be stark honesty. As Cantwell describes the "wake" that she holds for husband from whom she is recently divorced the reader listens to decribe how her greif drives her to escape her reality and replace her important relationships with conversation in strange places with strangers. In her struggle to redefine herself she is unable to ground her identity in the role of "wife" and thereofore she indirectly renounces her role of "mother" damaging her two young daughters. She losses her narative reliabiltity not in the retelling of the events of her story but in her inability to see the consequeces of her actions for both herself and for daughters. Cantwell clearly does not have the narative distance that she claims in her asumption that what she has written can be deemed a memoir. She is able to realize and transcribe in vivid detail the pain that she experienced. In these sincere confessions we begin to believe that she is a reliable narrator, as she confess that writing was her only method for survival. "To return to my children and to sight and sound and speech, I had to go far away and become aquainted with the only companion I have ever been able to rely on. As long as I had a pencil and paper and notes to make for my insignifigant little articels I was not alone." It would be dificult for the reader not to feel sympathy for Cantwell as trapped in her isolation as she confesses to be. It is exaclty the fact that she has becomes trapped within herself and has no perspective that I find her an unreliable narator. She uses writing to plow through isolation, confusion, and greif, not necessarily getting any clearer as the page gets full. Why is this memoir any diferent? She falls in love with a man that she had,"always believed could do anything but love anyone very much." She listens to her childs psychiatrist ask her to "just be a mother" to her child and has no ephifany. She prays to God to be delivered from perilious situations, back home with her family, and when arives home safely she repeats the cycle. My distrust of the ahenticity of the text as a memoir can be seen in the last lines. She is speaking to strangers, the readers, and she tells us that,"That day was the day I married New York." I want to know when a day will come when Cantwell will fall in love with and marry, herself.

Rating:
Summary: Still flawed but human
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Everything good that you're read about it is true
Review: 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.