From the author of American Girl, a "profoundly moving" memoir of single motherhood, loneliness, and finding one's way home (New York Times). Mary Cantwell's supple, seductive voice speaks out in her most revealing memoir, the conclusion of a trilogy about an American woman with one foot in her past and the other, warily, in her present. AMERICAN GIRL evoked the delights of her early youth in a small New England town. MANHATTAN WHEN I WAS YOUNG told of her marriage and children, her blossoming career in New York, and the decline of that marriage. In SPEAKING WITH STRANGERS she finds herself alone: a single mother in the big city, bereft of her husband if bolstered by friends, professionally successful if personally sad. She took to traveling, for "escape," to far regions of the world on magazine assignments. While wandering through Izmir, Belgrade, Tashkent, she would promise herself never to leave her children again if God would just get her out of...

Mary Cantwell, who has been a writer and editor at Mademoiselle and Vogue and a writer at the New York Times, gives us an elegant and lyrical autobiographical account of a time and place that for some exists only in imagination. But this is a life as it was actually lived, with romance, passion, and no little share of pain. Like her earlier, warmly received American Girl: Scenes from a Small-Town Childhood, Cantwell's new book "offers many of the pleas-ures more usually associated with the novel" (Washington Post Book World). In five different apartments in Manhattan, each with its own character and charm, Cantwell's story winds through its phases, from single working girl to young wife and mother, from career choices and divorce to rediscovery. The world Cantwell inhabits - that of magazine and book publishing and fashion and the middle-class bohemia of downtown New York at a golden moment in time - is brought beautifully to life in a memoir that is sure to win her new readers...