A Woven World: On Fashion, Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress

In this lyrical memoir, poet and essayist Deming (Zoologies) traces the role of handiwork in her life and the lives of her ancestors, highlighting the “painful fact” of a vanishing world of simplicity and beauty. She recounts summers spent in a Canadian fishing village once celebrated as “the sardine capital of the world,” where a “handmade, place-made way of life is nearly over.” A viewing of a fish-scale-inspired Yves Saint Laurent dress prompts memories of her grandmother and great-grandmother, both dressmakers, and sparks an investigation into their lives, taking her to New York and Paris, where she’s “resigned to find in fragments a picture of the whole.” In episodic spurts, Deming picks a topic, researches it, then investigates its relationship to her life; among the subjects considered are the origin of camel hair coats, the history of herring, and environmental degradation as a result of industrialization. Deming has a poet’s eye for details—she describes the shingles of her family’s 150-year-old house as “herring scales” and imagines the previous tenants “in beds together packed like sardines”—but the overall collage-like assemblage can feel a bit hodgepodge. Champions of a home-crafted way of life will find much to savor here—but they’d be best served reading in small doses. Agent: Laura Blake Peterson, Curtis Brown. (Aug.)