Mary Cantwell's MANHATTAN MEMOIR

A serendipitous find in the Mulberry Street branch of the New York Public Library, an exquisite box that smells like a yoga studio. The book I checked out actually holds 3 memoirs by the long time writer and editor; AMERICAN GIRL chronicles her childhood in Bristol, Rhode Island; MANHATTAN, WHEN I WAS YOUNG is about the launch of her career as a magazine girl, marriage and children, and SPEAKING WITH STRANGERS follows her into midlife with the personal frustrations of being a single mother.

Cantwell wrote her memoirs in the '90s, and she must have realized how closely her experiences mirrored those of many other women in her generation, coming of age right after World War II and interlacing city life and small-town values. This is especially evident in her discussion of the divorce; she was crushed to have to go through it, but her husband "B." had after years of tumult fallen in love with his secretary and wanted to marry her. Her Catholic upbringing rebelled against both the idea of divorce and the notion of finding love again; she eventually had a long and tortured affair with a married Southern novelist, from whom she felt she couldn't extricate herself. (But such is her discretion that she only refers to him as "the balding man." If you want to know who the lover was, read her Times obit. Kind of mean of them to do given that she worked for the Times!)

Unlike a lot of memoirs that look back at New York, Cantwell's latter two volumes hardly addresses the changes in the city, except when they affect her directly. Still, I found it fascinating to compare her life to mine even in details as minute as what her first apartment looked like and where it was proper for "magazine girls" to eat lunch. Her small-town upbringing I also related to in some respects, although I found that memoir alone a little dull compared to the rest. (Was born, played, switched schools, was teased; got older, had boyfriend, felt town was stifling; escaped. That's the lot of it.) SPEAKING WITH STRANGERS is almost a travel memoir, given the space Cantwell devotes to her trips all over the world -- ending with a bizarre stop in Hawaii -- but she remains emotionally tethered to her daughters and to a lesser extent "the balding man" in New York.

This book also gives the lie to the notion that work-life balance is a new issue for anyone. Cantwell never seriously considers quitting her job, but even before her daughters are born she struggles with trying to be the best wife and the best employee. She doesn't come to any broad revelation about how to fit all those pieces together, but in SPEAKING WITH STRANGERS she has at least made peace with the pieces.