Customer Reviews

Knitting Heaven and Earth: Healing the Heart with Craft

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

As I was about halfway thru this book I learned that Ms. Lydon had died (July 15, 2005), which made reading the remainder of the book-mostly about her returning cancer-all the more poignant. I had eagerly awaited this book after enjoying her book,The Knitting Sutra, a couple of years ago, and for the most part I was not dissapointed. I was not as enamoured with the chapters about her unhealthy relationship with Billy, but that is probably because as a recovering co-dependent myself, they hit a nerve. But I savored so much of everything else in this little jewel of a book, and I will certainly miss Ms. Lydon's voice.

It is not a perfect book, but it is a very good one. Her style is gentle, honest, insightful, and wise. I made a lot of notes in my journal as I read this. I am not a knitter, but the message is universal to me as a crochet person, as it would be to any type of crafter. Writing about the connection of the outer effort to the inner self, craft as meditation, a centering tool, the journey not the destination-the core themes of this book-Ms. Lydon drew me in completely. I read it as a gift. And, of course I could relate to the lure of yet more yarn, another project, unfinished ones still crammed in closets, or piled up on the chair a friend is trying to find a way it sit on!

This book does not teach us to knit, it shows us how knitting (crochet, quilting, scrapbooking, etc.,)connects us to parts of ourselves we may have lost, to parts we need to understand and heal, and to parts we need to nurture while we are in the middle of the harsh stuff life can slam in our faces (cancer, the loss of a parent, etc.)

This is a book I will keep and read again. I am proud to own it, and it will sit on my shelf as one of my "paper teachers"-the books that taught me something and fed my soul as well as my mind.

Rest in deserved peace, Ms. Lydon. You are already missed!

I'm a quilter, not a knitter, but I have experienced the calming nature of working with my hands. I also went through chemo with Susan, and was a member of the support group she talks about in this book. She writes so eloquently, and with such humor, about her life. Everyone I have given this book to has loved it, but it has a special place for me.

What a wonderful book. Ms. Lydon wove memoir and craft into a fascinating and inspirational read.

Her book spurred me to try lace knitting. I'm knitting my first lace garment right now: The bird's nest shawl from Folk Shawls, a book to which Ms. Lydon often refers. I'm knitting it in a tangerine cotton yarn for my grandmother, who lives in south Texas.

About 10 pages from the end of the book, I couldn't stand it anymore and went online to see if I could find her email address and write to her about her wonderful book. I found her obituary instead. Rest in peace, Susan.

I must be the lone voice in the wilderness and say I couldn't stand this book. It is absolutely awful. I could only make it halfway through. The author is not wise--she flails helplessly in her life. Reading this book is like watching someone drown. When her useless boyfriend upsets her, instead of dumping him or doing something constructive, she meditates "to gain the perspective of eternity." In other words, she does nothing positive to improve the situation and just goes back to him. It's tedious to read about.

Her prose is terrible, full of meaningless statements like "Sometimes a piece of knitting is simply itself," or 1950s cliches like "I've never understood the male animal." She gives a bizarre description of how she lay face to face with her drug-addicted boyfriend and "the bones in the center of my chest seemed to open" and they exchanged energy "in almost a figure eight pattern." When she meditates on her pain, she realizes that she "belongs to another reality, a larger conciousness, a vast and fruitful emptiness of luminous blackness and primal light." Say wha? If that kind of New Age babble sounds meaningful and special and insightful to you, you will probably like this book. I think it is nonsense.

Ms.Lydon writes a very personal day to day existence of how her craft helped her through the most serious time in her life till the end. Knitting, or anything doing with your hands, is a wonderous hobby and she lived it

This book disarms with its honesty--not just about knitting, but life. I was so drawn in (no pun intended) that the author's trials were devastating.

I read the whole thing, but I really didn't enjoy it. It was more about the traumas in the author's life than about how knitting helped heal her heart. Relatively little real knitting content, more psychological introspection. And needlepoint. I'm sorry that she passed away from the cancer she wrote about in this book, but that still doesn't make it a very uplifting read.

I wrote this review on my blog when Knitting Heaven and Earth first came out, but I'm rereading it now, and wanted to share it here.

In July, a friend sent me an email to say, "Susan Gordon Lydon died about 10 days ago--feminist author, knitter, and writer-about-knitting . . . and apparently an aficionado of qiviut."

I didn't recognize the name, but the description of this intrepid knitter caught my attention and I immediately googled her name. The search led to an obit that said she had been a founding editor of Rolling Stone magazine, the author of a seminal feminist article in the 1970s entitled, "The Politics of Orgasm," and, more recently, the author of two knitting books, The Knitting Sutra and Knitting Heaven and Earth, the second of which had been published barely a month before the author died of cancer.

The combination intrigued me, so I went to Amazon to check out her books. As I was skimming the excerpt from Knitting Heaven and Earth, I was jolted to attention when my own name popped into focus on the screen. In chapter 1, "Animal Comfort," Susan talks about how she got started knitting a lace shawl with qiviut (musk ox wool), after reading an article I had written in the Fall 2003 issue of Interweave Knits. In her description of knitting a qiviut shawl, she weaves in truths about power of women's friendships and the love and energy that get knitted into every stitch of our unique creations.

The book as a whole is described by the author in the introduction as being about "knitting and love" and also about "knitting and death." A poignant memoir covering the last years of Susan's life, the chapters are written with heartbreaking and hilarious candor. The author tells us about the loss of her father and a close friend, the discovery of new love as she gets to know her young godson, and the exhilaration, pain, and confusion of romance as she meets up with "the last of the Marlboro men" and decides that "some men should come with a warning." Throughout the book, Susan grapples with her own failing health, as she struggles through three different types of cancer and tries to come to terms with how to live in the face of death.

Although she had already had another form of cancer, and a biopsy on a benign lump in her breast, Susan went four years without getting a mammogram. Because she had fibroid cysts, she didn't pay much attention to the lumpiness in her breasts, and even after finding "a slight redness on the skin" of one of her breasts, she procrastinated about going to the doctor. Finally, when the skin started to feel strange, she made an appointment and began her journey though diagnosis, surgery, chemo, and radiation treatments. As she goes up and down through every emotion possible to experience, it is her knitting and needlepoint that keep her grounded and eventually lead her to emotional healing.

I am honored that my own work was mentioned in such a beautiful book, and I was glad to learn that my article on qiviut inspired Susan to try out the luxurious yarn in the lace knitting that brought joy and comfort to the last years of her life. I only wish I could have met her and shared some knitting secrets. I am so glad she finished Knitting Heaven and Earth and left it to us all along with her other writings.

each page has a memorable sentence. one does not have to knit to love this book.
it is small quick to read and good for anyone who is creative in the process of life.

Lydon's second book tying together threads of life and craft is as beautiful as the first. She takes you by the hand to skip through delicate pathways into the heart. She recalls the calm of summer days exploring new territory with old friends, the tenderness expressed between people whose bonds have been at times taught, loose and sometimes tensioned just right. She coaxes into bloom descriptions of several people whose lives were hanging in the balance as she wrote. I can't think of a more fitting or beautiful tribute to those loved, including ones self. The metaphorical knitting strands here allow a tracery of these intricate connections and her sensuous descriptions of yarn and technique flow beautifully along with her depictions of people and relationships. Read this.