The New York Times said that Mary Cantwell, in telling the story of her life, "Makes you discover yourself." Now, gathered in a single volume, are her three beautifully etched, unflinchingly honest memoirs. Cantwell's first book, American Girl , evoked the delights of her youth in a small New England town; her second, Manhattan, When I Was Young , told of her blossoming career in New York, her marriage and her children, and that marriage's decline. Speaking with Strangers finds Cantwell alone, a single mother struggling in the big city, bereft of her husband but bolstered by friends, thriving in her career yet personally troubled. With a sensibility as distinct as the city she calls home, Cantwell's autobiographical trilogy brilliantly captures her struggle to forge a life with one foot in her past and the other, warily, in her present.

"Cantwell writes with breathless intensity." -- People

"As in the best of memoirs, the place is a character in the play, and Cantwell's courage as a wife and working mother also has a life and inspiration of its own."-- Los Angeles Times