Let's Take the Long Way Home - A Review

Gail Caldwell does an exquisite job of inviting you in to share her innermost thoughts and feelings about friendship, addiction and love. This book is a love story about how best friends can share a bond that even husbands and lovers often can’t share. If you’ve ever had a best friend with whom you could share everything and anything, you know what I mean.

Let’s Take The Long Way Home: A Memoir Of Friendship (Random House Books, August 2010) is a moving book that is both sadly thought provoking and emotionally uplifting at the same time. I too lost my best friend to cancer and realize what a powerful loss that can be. It’s like a part of yourself is missing. It’s amazing how powerful and life changing a deep friendship can be.

How fortunate we are to find a “kindred soul” with whom we can share everything – the good, bad and even the ugly sides of ourselves. Author Gail Caldwell allows us to share the friendship between herself and her best friends. One friend is Caroline Knapp and the other is her beloved Samoyed, Clementine. The pivotal element weaving its way through the story is Caroline’s and Gail’s unwavering love for their dogs. “Everything really started with the dogs.”

Unless you’ve experienced such deep friendship and devotion with both your human friend and your canine friend, you may have a difficult time understanding the depth of this book. This book explores the journey of a woman who allowed herself to experience unconditional love and in return found her loving self.

This is also the story of overcoming addiction – addiction to cigarettes and alcohol. Both Gail and Caroline shared these addictions in common. Caroline died of cancer. Conquering addiction means looking deep inside for answers. Friendship that allows you to be your authentic self, allows you to search for the answers that are supportive of discovering those inner issues that manifest themselves into addictive behaviors.

Gail wrote about Caroline and Clementine from the heart of someone who has survived the loss of dear loved ones. It’s a love story to her two best friends who have departed from her physical life but remain as emotionally important today as they did then. “It’s taken years for me to understand that dying doesn’t end the story; it transforms it.” This book is a beautiful memoir to the power of unconditional love, deep friendship and the discovery of self.

Thank you Gail Caldwell for a beautifully written memoir about life, love and honoring precious memories.

Let's Take the Long Way Home - A Review