The
New York Times
said that
Mary Cantwell
, in telling the story of her life, "Makes you discover yourself." Now, gathered in a single volume, are her three beautifully etched, unflinchingly honest memoirs. Cantwell's first book,
American Girl
, evoked the delights of her youth in a small New England town; her second,
Manhattan, When I Was Young
, told of her blossoming career in New York, her marriage and her children, and that marriage's decline.
Speaking with Strangers
finds Cantwell alone, a single mother struggling in the big city, bereft of her husband but bolstered by friends, thriving in her career yet personally troubled. With a sensibility as distinct as the city she calls home, Cantwell's autobiographical trilogy brilliantly captures her struggle to forge a life with one foot in her past and the other, warily, in her present.