New Life, No Instructions by Gail Caldwell

Sunday Book Review
Moving Forward
‘New Life, No Instructions,’ by Gail Caldwell

By KATE BOLICK JUNE 20, 2014

On the cusp of turning 50, the artist Tracey Emin told the BBC: “I always thought that love was about desire, being with someone, holding someone, feeling someone. But it isn’t necessarily. Love can be different and come in lots of different ways and lots of different guises.” Her interviewer was suitably intrigued. England’s notorious “bad girl” no longer cared about shagging.

In her youth, Gail Caldwell was an enfant terrible of a different sort — a hard-­drinking bookworm from the Texas Panhandle with the bravura of a rodeo queen. She rode her unbridled audacity halfway across the country in pursuit of the writing life, then tamed it; after getting sober in her early 30s, she went on to become chief book critic for The Boston Globe. Along the way, a colleague of many years admitted to having mistaken her lifelong limp for a swagger. At 50, she won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

In the years since, she’s suffered more than her share of losses, and become a serial memoirist. “New Life, No Instructions,” her third, picks up where the second — about her extraordinary midlife friendship with Caroline Knapp, who died in 2002 — left off, exploring love’s different and above all unpredictable guises, from canine to fraternal.

That this new memoir was occasioned by a hip replacement, of all things, is a testament to her audacity. That the subplot revolves around getting a new dog did not improve matters for this reader (I am not a dog person). That neither hurdle proved a barrier to entry confirms that, as far as I’m concerned, Caldwell can write about whatever she pleases; it’s a rare writer who can transform a commonplace surgery into a launching pad for life’s big questions. “What do you do when the story changes in midlife?” she asks. “When a tale you have told yourself turns out to be a little untrue, just enough to throw the world off-kilter?”

That swaggering limp was the result of the polio she contracted as an infant in 1951, before the vaccines. Ever since, her right leg had been 1.5 inches shorter than the left, a discrepancy she didn’t bother herself with until a standard X-ray revealed her hip to be “a junkyard of bone.” Coming on the heels of acquiring a new Samoyed, the training of which is a physical ordeal in itself, news of invasive surgery is particularly unwelcome, not to mention that at 60 she’s still unmarried, standing alone on the bridge to old age.

And so it is this — her status as a never-­married woman in her seventh decade, a growing demographic we still know so little about — that makes the book not only a pleasure to read, brimming with insights and wisdom, but valuable as well. Her crisis forces the discovery that the “concentric circles of intimacy” she had been living within are actually “a force field of connection,” in which those so-called lesser bonds — “neighbors and dog people and rowers and writers and A.A. people and women from the gym” — prove as durable as family. That she’s made her home in the villagelike city of Cambridge, Mass., where she’s on a first-name basis with half the people on her block, has something to do with it. So does solitude itself, which “makes you stretch your heart — the usual buffers of spouse and children are missing, so you reach toward the next circle of intimacy.”

That is, if you’re so inclined. Because just as important as Caldwell’s recognition of her unconventional support system is her modeling of what it takes to be a person who earns such care and solicitation. It’s not by luck she’s so well loved; it’s the generosity and thoughtfulness she brings to her interactions, no matter how insignificant. When she leaves for surgery at dawn on Halloween, she puts baskets of peanut butter cups on the front porch for the trick-or-treaters.

The scholar Leigh Gilmore has written that the “serial autobiographer returns to the scene because she has left a body there which requires further attention.” If we’re lucky, Caldwell will continue on like that other never-married writer, Diana Athill, who published her first memoir at 44, and her seventh at 93. Unabashed dispatches from lifelong single women are a fairly recent phenomenon. Caldwell has so much more to teach us.

NEW LIFE, NO INSTRUCTIONS

A Memoir

By Gail Caldwell

Random House