The Knitting Circle by Ann Hood

I was telling a friend about The Knitting Circle, the new novel by Ann Hood.

In it, we meet Mary, a woman nearly incapacitated by the sudden death of her 5-year-old daughter. Reluctantly, she yields to her mother’s pressure and ventures out to a local yarn shop to take up knitting. There she meets other women. Mary doesn’t know it at first, but each has her own pain to bear.

“Sounds like a chick flick,” my friend said.

Yeah, it does — but a very good one.

Ann Hood can really write, and the groundings of this book and the insights within it come sadly and powerfully from a place other than the writer’s imagination.

Hood wrote The Knitting Circle after she lost her own young daughter, Grace, to a virulent form of strep. Hood, too, turned to knitting. No wonder Mary’s aching emptiness and deep sorrow both carry such a ring of truth.

Mary is like most of us. She doesn’t fully realize all she has until it is taken away. She is busy — a woman in her 40s busy raising her daughter with her husband, Dylan, busy in her reviewer job at an alternative paper. With the sudden, unforeseeable death of her little girl, Stella, it all grinds to a halt. What before sparked her passion no longer makes sense.

She can’t write. Her house is suddenly too large and quiet. She pulls away emotionally from her husband. Their grief is such a mammoth thing, it comes between them. Mary, barely able to function, hasn’t the will or the strength to do much of anything to halt the amassing collateral damage.

Enter Mary’s mother, a woman who she is in contact with but largely estranged from. For most of Mary’s life, her mother has been a detached, undependable figure. But with the loss of Stella, and Mary’s reaction to that loss, her mother gets on her about knitting. She even gets the proprietor of a local yarn shop, Big Alice’s Sit and Knit, to call her.

Finally, Mary relents and shows up at the weekly meeting of Big Alice’s knitting circle. Alice, an older woman, no-nonsense but kind, gets her started on the basics. She shows her that, in knitting, mistakes can be undone, and that if you allow stitch to follow stitch and row to follow row, something greater will eventually take shape. Mary has to admit her mother had a point; at least while she was doing it, the knitting seemed to quiet her mind.

There are, however, no miracle cures here. Mary can’t just dust herself off and go back to her career. She and Dylan grow farther apart. When they make love, it’s only sex, creature comfort for the moment.

What Mary finds she can do is go to the knitting circle. There she finds the comfort of the knitting itself and, gradually, the companionship of the other women in it.

They are a varied crew. The French bakery shop owner who confects exquisite pastries, the sharp-tongued bohemian, the woman everyone knows has a sick child, the chirpy housewife who can’t stop going on about her wonderful children and leaves Mary seething.

Initially, it’s just the knitting they have in common. But, one by one, Mary learns the women’s stories. With each, the truth is much more than first appearances would suggest. Each is struggling with her own great pain.

This construction isn’t original, but it doesn’t matter. Each woman’s story is compelling in its own way. There’s none of the “and you thought you had it bad” here. One woman’s grief doesn’t undercut any other’s. They are all afforded their own due respect.

And none provides the healing lightning bolt. Mary’s eventual reentry into the land of the living is slow and tentative, even reluctant, with a lot of pain along the way. And the reader isn’t asked to believe she will ever be just fine. What mother who has lost a child ever could be?

The Knitting Circle is about finding a way to live, to go on even when reasons for doing so seem to have been taken from you. If that chick flick my friend talked about was ever made from this book, Hollywood would probably mess it up with The Uplifting Ending.

But Hood doesn’t do that. She knows better, as anyone who has experienced real, searing loss knows. And that makes The Knitting Circle all the more valuable.