Book Review: *The Threadbare Heart* by Jennie Nash

The Threadbare Heart by Jennie Nash

Back-of-the-book blurb:  Lily wonders about her long marriage. Was it worth all the work, the self-denial? Did she stay with Tom just to avoid loneliness? Should she have been more like her mother, Eileen-thrice-married and even now, approaching eighty, cavalier about men and, it seems, even her daughter’s emotions?

She is Too Fond of Books’ review:  Oh, don’t read the full back-of-the-book blurb when you pick this up at a bookstore … just know that it’s about relationships – our relationships to physical things that invoke memories, relationships to traditions, and our relationships to people (family and friends).  Most deeply of all, Jennie Nash explores the mother-daughter relationship.

Lily (in her mid-forties) and her mother, Eleanor (almost eighty) couldn’t be more different than night and day.  Lily has lived for years clear across the country, as if to emphasize their differences.  While Lily and her husband Tom seem to be as much in love as the day the married (which might prove to be too high a bar for their sons to strive for), Eleanor has been married three times, more for convenience and mutual benefits than for love.

Eleanor owns an international textile company, creating and importing fine linens.  She sees this as simply a business venture, and doesn’t get excited about the fabrics, patterns, and textures, the way Lily does.  In fact, Eleanor has always distanced herself from the “crafty” part of the textile industry, eschewing and embarrassed by her own mother’s home-sewn clothes years ago.  Lily considers herself to be much more like her grandmother than her mother, and appreciates the way her grandmother taught her the craft of sewing; she holds onto her grandmother’s old metal Singer sewing machine and the strong memories it carries.

Although Lily thinks her mother is oblivious, or simply doesn’t care about the distance between them, Jennie Nash shows various points of view, so the reader is privy to the thoughts and observations of these two women.  Here we see two sides of Eleanor, one a little introspective:

She was talking about seeing the repercussions of your actions played out in the next generation, and the next.  She hadn’t paid much attention to Lily, and maybe Lily had paid too much attention to Ryan and Luke.  Everyone expected a mother to be perfect, to give the child exactly what the child needed, and no mother could ever live up to it.  Then the children grow up, and go out and try to make up for what was missing – by living a carefully structured life the way Lily had done, free of risk, free of fun.

This side of Eleanor has her justifying her choices:

She didn’t miss living with a man.  She didn’t miss having a man come home on Friday night to say that they would be having eight people for brunch the next morning.  She didn’t miss having to talk to the dull wives of men her husband found interesting.  She liked spending long hours in her own company having the entire crossword puzzle to herself, being able to invite whomever she wanted to a party.

Nash’s writing goes deep into the hearts of both women, and she shows us that the two women may not be as different as they appear.  When tragedy strikes, we see the strong bonds of Eleanor’s friendships, maybe she does know how to love after all.  Perhaps Lily and Eleanor can learn something from each other.

I recommend The Threadbare Heart not simply as “a good story”, but as one that may have you looking at your own relationships with a more critical, more revealing, eye. 

If you have something to say about mother-daughter relationships in fiction, please enter Jennie Nash’s Mother’s Day Mini Essay contest.  The winner on this blog will receive a signed copy of The Threadbare Heart, and be entered to win the Grand Prize, a “book club in a box.”