With a voice that has deepened and matured, Mary Cantwell gives us her most revealing book yet. Evoking the same sense of place she brought first to American Girl and then to Manhattan, When I Was Young, she records the next seven years of her life, a time in which she had a fever to roam the world, less to see it than to experience it. Out of an overwhelming desire to get away from a broken marriage and the ensuing loneliness, she was catapulted into a life in which, at last, she learned to accept and even enjoy the person that she was.

In soaring, lyrical prose, Cantwell recalls with startling honesty and humor her travels through Turkey, Yugoslavia, and Russia and her fervent promise never to leave her children again if God would just get her out of whatever hellhole she found herself in. Invariably, the promise lasted only as long as it took her to pack for her next assignment. She writes of her longing to embrace a semblance of a "normal" life and how that longing was met by an inevitably disastrous affair with a famous, womanizing writer she calls the "balding man" With profound affection, she also recounts her friendship with the reclusive novelist Frederick Exley, in all its oddity and brio.

The conclusion of a trilogy about a certain kind of a woman, one whom Cantwell defines as a cross between Daisy Miller and Daisy Kennecott, Speaking with Strangers is a moving and fiercely candid account of how its author finally came into her own.