Swan Hills Municipal Library

An extraordinary and moving reading experience, HOW TO MAKE AN AMERICAN QUILT is an exploration of eight women of yesterday and today, who join together in a uniquely female experience.  As they gather year after year, their stories, their wisdom, their lives, form the pattern from which all of us draw warmth and comfort for ourselves and piece together an  quilt of their own imaginative devising.  And as they stitch, we listen to the stories they have to tell of their successes and failures, their lives and loves, their dreams, desires, and the surprise and sometimes joy of living. 

Like a quilt, this novel fuses different stories concerning a group of older women who sew together in a small California town. The narrator is a granddaughter who overhears them; she reports on and forges a unity out of these diverse lives in the story that closes the novel. Critics praise the work’s structure, which mimics the idea of community explored in the stories.

Imaginative in concept and execution, Otto’s remarkable first novel is designed with deliberate analogies to quilt-making; like the scraps of fabric that make up a quilt, a series of neat vignettes reveal the lives of eight members of a woman’s sewing group in a small California town, in portraits that include their families and neighbors.  Each chapter is followed by a short set of “Instructions” which provide lucid explanations of the histories, designs and techniques of various quilt patterns that reflect and symbolize the conditions of the characters’ lives.  The instructions also carry a subtext: assemble and stitch a quilt as you would build and sustain a human relationship.

The women who form Otto’s narrative quilt include two sisters whose love for each other survives sexual betrayal; a fearless teenager who loses her determination to lead a free, unfettered life when she traps herself into marriage; a half-black woman who cannot escape her heritage; a wife who forgives her husband’s flagrant affairs.  The narrative touches on the larger issues of war, prejudice and the economic condition of women and concludes with a description of the Crazy Quilt, “the pattern with the least amount of discipline and the greatest measure of emotion”.

I felt that this was a wonderful read.  The book, like a beautiful quilt, was a wonderful way to stitch together the lives of these amazing women.  How wonderful would it be to talk to the women in your life (Grandmothers, Aunts, Great Aunts, Cousins) and find the quilt pattern of their lives. 

Editorial Reviews

Otto’s remarkable debut, a series of vignettes that cumulatively reveal the lives of eight members of a women’s sewing group, spent seven weeks on PW’s hardcover bestseller list and was a Literary Guild alternate. - Publisher’s Weekly

“Intensely thoughtful…honest…intelligent….The book spans half a century and addresses not only (these women’s) histories but also their children’s, their lovers’, their country’s, and, in the process, their gender’s.” - San Francisco Chronicle

Remarkable…It is a tribute to an art form that allowed women self-expression even when society did not. Above all, though it is an affirmation of the strength and power of individual lives, and the way they cannot help fitting together.- The New York Times Book Review

How To Make An American Quilt was made into a major motion picture which came out in the fall of 1995 starring Maya Angelou, Winona Ryder, and Rip Torn.

About The Author

Whitney Otto of wrote the short story that she expanded into, How to Make an American Quilt, when she was working on an MFA at the University of California at Irvine., Now You See Her, and The Passion Dream Book.  A native of California, she lives with her husband and son in Portland, Oregon.