How to Make an American Quilt
by Whitney Otto
To cut to the chase, if you like the film adaptation, you’ll like the original novel How to Make an American Quilt. I didn’t like either, so feel free to skip this review if you don’t think it’ll speak to you.
A young woman is floundering, unsure of her life path and her love life and who she is as a person and basically anything else she can think of to be unsure about. This is the main character. She feels like she doesn’t have a connection with her mother, has no sense of self, and is afraid of getting married and turning into a “wife” for the rest of her life. Join the club; that’s what’s known as becoming an adult.
So, to get to know herself (and to take me literally), she joins her mother’s quilting club, with her aunts, family friends, and grandmother. The metaphor is extremely obvious: we’re all products of the different people who weave life lessons and behavioral patterns into our lives. As we pass on what we know to the next generation, the quilt gets bigger and stronger. I didn’t really find the message very deep. There’s more you can learn from life than just getting to know your female relatives. If you don’t have a large family, or the women are terrible people and you have no desire to spend time with them, you can teach yourself your own lessons and float along. To me, the message of the book feels stagnant. It’s supposed to be a book empowering women, but in a way, it seems to be saying, “Keep your head down and do what everyone else has done. Life sucks and get used to it.” While I’m the first to agree with that second sentence, I think it’s unrealistic to suppose young people would actually listen to their elders rather than figure things out for themselves after trying and failing however many times they need to. If every girl listened to her parents, no teenager would ever find herself in the family way.
Be sure to check out Hot Toasty Rag's review of the 1995 film adaptation here!
A young woman is floundering, unsure of her life path and her love life and who she is as a person and basically anything else she can think of to be unsure about. This is the main character. She feels like she doesn’t have a connection with her mother, has no sense of self, and is afraid of getting married and turning into a “wife” for the rest of her life. Join the club; that’s what’s known as becoming an adult.
So, to get to know herself (and to take me literally), she joins her mother’s quilting club, with her aunts, family friends, and grandmother. The metaphor is extremely obvious: we’re all products of the different people who weave life lessons and behavioral patterns into our lives. As we pass on what we know to the next generation, the quilt gets bigger and stronger. I didn’t really find the message very deep. There’s more you can learn from life than just getting to know your female relatives. If you don’t have a large family, or the women are terrible people and you have no desire to spend time with them, you can teach yourself your own lessons and float along. To me, the message of the book feels stagnant. It’s supposed to be a book empowering women, but in a way, it seems to be saying, “Keep your head down and do what everyone else has done. Life sucks and get used to it.” While I’m the first to agree with that second sentence, I think it’s unrealistic to suppose young people would actually listen to their elders rather than figure things out for themselves after trying and failing however many times they need to. If every girl listened to her parents, no teenager would ever find herself in the family way.
Be sure to check out Hot Toasty Rag's review of the 1995 film adaptation here!