The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.Įveryone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). Will resonate with women readers of all ages, who, if they are dog lovers, will be doubly moved. The story of that final illness and of Caldwell’s grief at losing her best friend is a poignant and powerful. In April 2002, Knapp was diagnosed with incurable lung cancer, and less than two months later she died. Caldwell writes with deep feeling, but without sentimentality, about the life-altering friendship they formed. When time allowed, they vacationed together, sometimes with Knapp’s boyfriend along, sometimes with just their loyal dogs. Each admired the prowess of the other and strove to achieve it.
Knapp, a devoted rower, trained Caldwell in that skill, and Caldwell taught Knapp to become a good swimmer.
These two brainy, independent women, both somewhat introverted loners, spent hours outdoors together, walking, talking, exercising their beloved dogs, rowing and swimming. Knapp had previously published a memoir titled Drinking: A Love Story. Caldwell, some eight or nine years older than Knapp, devotes a sizable chunk of this volume to an account of her long struggle with alcoholism and her recovery from it. Besides writing and dogs, the two women had much in common, including athleticism, health problems, a history of alcoholism and belief in the value of psychodynamic therapy. A Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s heartfelt memoir of her midlife friendship with a fellow writer.Ĭaldwell, then book-review editor for the Boston Globe, and Caroline Knapp, a columnist for the Boston Phoenix, connected in 1996, when their love of their dogs, Clementine and Lucille, brought them together in a meadow near Boston.
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