Live! From the Library

When New York Times bestselling author Peggy Orenstein takes up a subject, she plunges in, so it is no surprise that her pandemic distraction—knitting—would produce something other than the usual scarves and hats for loved ones. With her trademark curiosity, Orenstein set out to make a sweater from scratch—shearing a ewe, spinning and dying the wool – and along the way learned far more than she ever imagined.  Yes, she figured out how to de-fleece a sheep, but she also recognized the radical nature of traditional women’s work, came to terms with relationships in her family and faced up to a few new truths about herself —all while processing personal grief and keeping the anxiety of the times at bay.

In her captivating memoir, Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dying Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater, Orenstein recounts how, while everyone else was stress-baking and doomscrolling through the COVID-19 shutdown, she felt the inexplicable, unquenchable urge to confront a large animal, snip off its fleece, and transform it, step-by-step, into a cozy, comforting garment. “Learning to shear sheep during the pandemic had seemed like a bit of a lark,” Orenstein reports, “a way to tap into the romance and resilience of an earlier age; to connect with something enduring when life had become so precarious; to better understand, as a lifelong knitter, where my fiber came from; to get out of my house. Why the hell couldn’t I have stuck to sourdough?”

What Orenstein didn’t expect was all she would discover about how clothing has shaped civilization, class, culture, power, or its pivotal role in our environmental future. Or how the ancient skills she learned would deepen her awareness of women’s work or challenge her sense of place and home. She didn’t anticipate that her quirky project would reflect the social justice reckonings of the moment, or that making yarn would help her untangle the knots of her own life.

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