Weekend Review: Fabric by Victoria Findlay

 

Fabric / Victoria Finlay
NY: Pegasus, c2022.
528 p.

This week I have another fabric focused read! This time I'm highlighting a book that I listened to while sewing - that made it particularly interesting as I went along. 

I thought this was a great read. Findlay covers a whole bunch of fabric types, shares stories of her travels and explorations of the history and current state of each, and also ties this all in with her personal life as she deals with her parents aging and death as her research trips progress. This was moving and gave extra depth to her perceptions of the places she travelled to; it also showed very clearly how long it takes to research and write a book like this. 

With the inclusion of her own story, this book reads more like a memoir, or at least "memoir adjacent". You'll either appreciate it or not, that's up to you to figure out. I liked it, and the final chapter about her mother's death made me, like many other reviewers, cry.

The fabric history parts are more like stories of her travels to find out about the usual suspects like cotton, hemp, wool, silk, and so on, but also some more unusual fabrics like tweed, jute, barkcloth and tapa. I was fascinated, especially by her travels to Papua New Guinea. Really interesting to see how the fabric is a community affair, a marker of identity and skill. She even has a short excursion into patchwork with a trip to Gee's Bend - not a fabric but definitely a fabric related community. 

This is quite long so if you have it in hardback you could dip into it between other reads. The chapter lengths are uneven though, so if you plan on reading one chapter before bed, try say the tweed chapter rather than the 100 page + cotton chapter! Anyhow, there is so much to this it's hard to cover it all. I will just say that I liked it, found her research into things like fabric related etymology fascinating, thought she wove her personal story in fairly well, and that I learned something here. I also thought that the audiobook, read by Carla Kissane, was well done, balanced and very easy to listen to. It's a great addition to the many books on similar subjects, with its own approach.