The protagonist of Ann Hood’s new novel, The Knitting Circle, is a woman whose five-year-old daughter, Stella, has died suddenly from a short, virulent illness. In real life, Hood lost her own five-year-old daughter, Grace, to a sudden illness five years ago.
You should not assume, however, that The Knitting Circle, published by Norton last January, is about Hood and her terrible loss. “I know many people will read it and assume it’s about me,” Hood says. “One friend sent me an email about something that happens in the book, saying how sorry he was, that he had no idea that had happened. I emailed back, ‘It’s a novel!’ Not every detail is true.”
Still, there is an essential truth in the story, just as there is in Hood’s six previous novels and her book of short stories, The Ornithologist’s Guide to Life. “Every book I write comes from a story that I have,” she says. “This one was no different in that, at the heart, it was a true thing. My job is to explore that truth deeply. I changed almost all the details, because I think that allows you to tell the emotional truth.”
The novel is a sort of a triumph for Hood ’78, and not just because it may well be her best novel yet. There’s triumph in the sheer fact that she managed to write it at all. For almost two years after her daughter’s death, Hood found herself unable to write or read. Words swam on the page, refusing to come together into coherent thoughts. All her life, words had been a companion, a sounding board, a way to work through her feelings, hopes, and fears. When her ability to make sense of words deserted her, she felt doubly betrayed.
On the advice of friends, she took up knitting. “It saved my life,” she says, “and I’m not saying that with any hyperbole. There are real, studied benefits of knitting. You can do it without thinking, but you need to concentrate. When my mind would go to some terrible place, I would screw up what I was knitting and I’d have to stop and fix it. That would bring me back to that Zen place.”
Her husband, Lorne Adrain ’76, her now 13-year-old son, Sam, and her large extended family were pleased, she says, that she’d found something that helped her to focus. “Lorne’s mother is a knitter, too, so it was a natural thing for him when I sat and knitted, kind of a comfort for him, too,” she says. “I think everyone was glad, though, when I stopped giving knitted things as Christmas gifts!”
Young writers are often told, “Write what you know.” Hood prefers a variation on that. She once heard the author Grace Paley tell an audience, “Write what you don’t know about what you know.” That’s the motto Hood has written by ever since, and she kept it in mind in writing The Knitting Circle. The seven women in the circle—as well as a couple of characters on its periphery—have all had an experience that shattered them in some way. Hood certainly knew about loss and grief, but she also knew she didn’t know everything about it. “I wanted to explore all kinds of loss,” she says. “Each of the characters is in a different place in her transformation. There’s the person who’s bitter, the one who’s hopeful, the one who’s afraid.”
Through her characters, Hood explores human frailty as well as human resilience in the face of the trials and tragedies life can throw our way.
The Knitting Circle is Hood’s current favorite among her books. “When you finish a book, you’re so riding on a sense of accomplishment,” she says. “You always love your last one the best.”
Her pride in the book also stems from a sense of achievement as a writer. “Many of the things I’ve had some trouble with in other books—things like plot and an overlying structure—I was able to do more easily here, so I feel really happy about that.
“Part of it is practice,” she continues. “On the one hand, I’ve done this so many times. But somehow, with this one, I was also able to get to a purer place of writing, more like I did with my first book.”
The Knitting Circle is similar to that first novel, Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, in other ways, too. “Therew’s been a lot of excitement about this book,” she says. “When my first book was published, there was a similar kind of buzz. A lot of early stuff [that can lead to a book’s success] that can happen has happened.”
Her book tour for this novel, for instance, is the biggest she’s ever done. She spent the winter and spring traveling back and forth across the country giving readings at bookstores and—unusual but not surprising, given her book’s setting—knitting shops. “I love talking to knitting circles,” she says. “I do a short reading, then I sit and knit with everybody.”
Words have returned to Ann Hood with full force. The writer, who lives in Providence with Lorne, Sam, and two-and-a-half-year-old Annabelle, who joined the family from China in 2005, is currently at work on another novel, a number of stories that she hopes will ultimately form a novel, a collection of essays about Grace, and a young adult novel that will be published next spring.
She still knits every day, too, though she claims to be something of a beginner, still. “I remember when I was trying to make a hat—with snowflakes or moose or ducks or something—you count and measure and subtract and add, and I said, ‘Wait! This is math! I can’t do math!’ ”
As she does with her writing, as she does with her life, she persevered. Hats are easy now. “Maybe,” she says with a laugh, “in a year I’ll be able to say I can knit a sweater.”
