Yarn : Remembering the Way Home

by Mori, Kyoko

• ISBN13: 9781934848630
• ISBN10: 1934848638
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-11-01
• Publisher: Ingram Pub Services

Summary

As steadily and quietly as her marriage falls apart, so Kyoko Mori¿s understanding of knitting deepens. From the flawed school mittens made in her native Japan, where needlework is used as a way to prepare women for marriage and silence, to the beautiful unmatched patterns of cardigans, hats and shawls made in the American Midwest, Kyoko draws the connection between knitting and the new life she tried to establish in the U.S. From the suicide of her mother to the last empty days of her marriage, Kyoko finds a way to begin again on her own terms. Interspersed with fact and history about knitting throughout, the narrative touchingly contemplates the nature of love, loss and what holds a marriage together. In the tradition of M F K Fisher¿s The Gastronomical Me, Joan Didion¿s Where I Was From and Michael Pollan¿s The Botany of Desire, Mori examines a specific subject to understand human nature - when to unravel, when to begin again, when to drop the stitch, and when to declare¿it¿s finished.

Author Biography

Kyoko Mori’s award-winning first novel, Shizuko's Daughter, was hailed by the New York Times as “a jewel of a book, one of those rarities that shine out only a few times in a generation.”  Her many critically acclaimed books include Polite Lies, The Dream of Water, and the novels, Stone Field, True Arrow and One Bird. Her stories and essays have appeared in The American Scholar, The Kenyon Review, The Prairie Schooner, Harvard Review, The Best American Essays, and other journals and anthologies. Mori holds a Ph.D. in English/Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She was Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Creative Writing, Harvard (1999-2005) and, for the last 5 years, on the faculty of the Lesley University Low-Residency MFA program in Cambridge. Kyoko Mori is associate professor of English at George Mason University. She lives in Washington, DC .