Yarn

Early Praise for YARN

" ‘....knitting only appears to be a docile activity," writes Kyoko Mori in Yarn. While it is knitting that literally and metaphorically weaves together the disparate elements of Mori's life-her travels, her marriage and separation, her coming to knowledge of herself through tragedy and joy-it is the sheer beauty of her writing, at once elegantly restrained and emotionally unflinching, that so highly recommends this stunning memoir. Kyoko Mori is one of the world's most inimitable writers."

- Howard Norman, author of What Is Left The Daughter

"Kyoko Mori's books are like red dragonflies at sunset. Afterwards, I'm not sure if I really experienced them or if it was a dream.

Writing as a woman caught between cultures, Mori is a marvelous hybrid of Western realism and Eastern sublimity.

Whether she is remembering her young mother's suicide, a visit with an estranged father, or the return to solitude after marriage, Mori writes with deftness and penetration.

There is no sentimentality in her thoughts, hopes, and memories. Experience seems to fly into the room, like a wounded bird that is nursed diligently.

Even when Mori writes about seemingly banal activities, like a jog along the sea or knitting a sweater, she is trenchant and memorable."

- Henri Cole, winner of the Kingsley Tufts, the Rome Prize in Literature, and the Lenore Marshal Poetry Prize author of Middle Earth and Blackbird and Wolf among other collections

"Kyoko Mori writes about loss so quietly and wisely, and in a way no other memoirist I've read has ever managed. She recasts her mother's suicide and her father's coldness-two terrible childhood absences-into possibilities for herself rather than limitations, openings instead of endings. But this beautiful book isn't about acceptance so much as it's about resourcefulness and creativity. There's no advice here, only the moving example of Mori herself, knitting together her past and present into something coherent and useful, like a shawl, or a cardigan, or a pair of mittens, a way to keep warm in a world that can often be cold, a way to stay focused and engaged in a world that sometimes makes no sense at all."

- Suzanne Berne, The Ghost at the Table, A Perfect Arrangement, A Crime in the Neighbourhood (Orange Prize for Fiction), and the forthcoming memoir Lucile: My Grandmother in History, and Vice Versa.

"Save reading Kyoko Mori's Yarn for a day when your imagination needs a journey into enchantment. A dreamy weave of memoir and story that is also a droll cross-cultural history of knitting, spinning and weaving, this enthralling, utterly original book is a small masterpiece. I couldn't put it down.

- Honor Moore, The Bishop's Daughter

"Sit with Kyoko Mori as she artfully takes in hand needles and fiber, and also the realities of her life story, to knit this gorgeous memoir of loss, emigration, grief, identity and the work of her hands. The perfectly titled "Yarn" recounts the author's most formative experiences, including losing her mother through suicide; emigrating from Japan; finding a life and a love in America's frigid Midwest; discovering joy as a single person; and leaning on the healing power of creating both stories and knitted garments. Scenes and stories become stitches forming a shawl of stories that have draped the author's life, and that will rest so memorably on the shoulders of readers fortunate enough to encounter this book."

- Suzanne Strempek Shea,

Sundays in America: A Year-Long Roadtrip in Search of Christian Faith

"In Yarn, Kyoko Mori employs the metaphor of knitting to devastating effect: strands are wound together seamlessly into a single garment, which is used to keep the wearer/reader/author warm."

- David Shields,

The Thing About Life is that One Day You'll Be Dead