Speaking With Strangers - Hardcover

In her first memoir, An American Girl , Mary Cantwell recounts how as a young woman growing up in the 1930s and 1940s she longed to escape her small town and experience something more exciting. She found her escape by moving to New York and building a successful career in the modeling industry. Her second memoir, Manhattan, When I Was Young, is a sparkling account of those New York days and nights. In her third memoir, Speaking with Strangers, Cantwell has come full circle and again longs to escape and experience something new. The breakdown of her marriage and her father's death left Cantwell feeling isolated and disconnected, craving new intimacies to compensate for the ones she had lost. Traveling on photographic assignments gave Cantwell the opportunity to refresh her psyche and forge new bonds. Through a series of minitravel vignettes, Cantwell constructs colorful characterizations of the eclectic gathering of characters she encounters from all corners of the world. From Australian sheep ranchers and Russian soldiers to novelists and ministers, strangers enter and exit Cantwell's life absorbing her into conversations. Yet Cantwell realizes that traveling provides a "peculiar intimacy of people who will never see each other again," and we are left feeling that she will never find the intimacy for which she longs. This is Cantwell's most revealing memoir yet, in which she provides extremely personal reflections on family, friends, and her inner-self.

Mary Cantwell is a member of the New York Times Editorial Board.