Nonfiction by Maddie Ballard, reviewed by Ellen Prentiss Campbell
PATCHWORK: A SEWIST’S DIARY (Tin House)
Maddie Ballard’s debut, the memoir Patchwork: A Sewist’s Diary, offers extended reflection on a significant recent period in the author’s life. Using spare first-person prose, Ballard recounts her adjustment and quiet transformation during and just after the Covid-19 pandemic. Her evolution is catalyzed by learning to sew, to follow a pattern, to alter a pattern, and finally to create her own patterns and design her clothing. The author documents increasing mastery of technique, design, and structure in both her sewing and her writing. She’s learning who she is, who she aspires to be, her needs, and her strengths.
This subtle metamorphosis begins as she returns, with her partner, from Britain to her native New Zealand. Displaced by Covid, “moving sixteen times in the space of a year,” she is isolated and adrift. Ballard is bi-racial; her Chinese grandmother Por-Por gives the author a sewing machine she herself no longer uses. The gift proves steadying, sustaining, and life changing.
Month by month, garment by garment, the author progresses from self-taught sewing novice to creative, competent sewist and designer. Ballard creates a personal wardrobe of expressive garments. Through sewing, she comes to understand and respect her body, her talents, her hopes and needs, her identity. Life events unfold as background context: separation from her long-term partner, working as a food journalist, entering an MFA program. The vivid foreground of Ballard’s memoir, the connecting narrative thread, is the power gained by sewing. Creating her own clothes, she recognizes and honors herself as a talented, creative, worthy individual:
Every garment is bespoke by default, and your figure, not some ‘ideal’ figure is the centre. Homemade trousers should hold your living and singular body with tenderness. You do not have to settle for something fitting quite well.
Each chapter, styled as a present-tense, chronological diary entry, is marked by a full page with an evocative title, both description and metaphor, and a subtitle listing materials, type of garment, and source of pattern. For example:
Moral Fibre
Black and beige gingham linen, tan polyester thread
//Self-drafted zero-waste dress.
The next page of the chapter features a black and white sketch by illustrator Emma Dai’an Wright, an impressionistic drawing of the titular piece of clothing, floating alone across the page. The reader sees, as though through the author’s mind’s eye, both the dreamed and realized garment.
Each garment becomes part of Ballard’s wardrobe, as well as part of her increasingly sure identity. The clothes are statements, proclamations of self—even if sometimes, the author acknowledges, they are a performative costume or protective armor. Each successive stand-alone chapter becomes an integral part of Ballard’s cumulative, linked meditations chronicling growing skill and confidence as sewist, writer, person.
Aptly titled, the memoir is an artfully designed patchwork (by no means an accident-on-purpose crazy quilt). The individual chapters are the literary equivalent of the complementary blocks of jewel-toned milliner’s velvet in an heirloom quilt, revealing the maker’s artistic vision as well as skill.
This unusual book will speak to several audiences. Certainly, it will speak to readers who practice textile arts or crafts like sewing, knitting, crochet, embroidery, weaving, or beadwork. Patchwork will also resonate with those who never, or rarely, pick up a needle of any kind—perhaps someone who had a sewing grandmother and inherited her machine will be inspired to take a vintage Singer out of the closet.
This memoir will also be appreciated by readers interested in the social, economic, industrial, and cultural history of textile and clothing manufacture, such as those who enjoyed Clare Hunter’s Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle (Abrams Press, 2020), a comprehensive narrative of sewing as necessity and luxury, textile work as livelihood, in cottages and factories. Ballard’s boldness with her shears and original designs will be familiar to knitters inspired (and daunted) by the audacious Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Knitting Without Tears (Schoolhouse Press, 1971).
Readers fascinated by fashion as manifestation of personality and culture will find Patchwork an excellent companion to the biography Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free (Simon & Schuster, 2025) by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson. Under-recognized, McCardell was the mid-twentieth century visionary who gave women pockets and the wrap dress.
Patchwork is also for anyone who knows (despite Thoreau’s warning to be wary of enterprises requiring new clothes) the delight of trying on a garment for the first time, fresh off the rack or sewn by hand, that fits and feels just right and imbues the wearer with hope of transformation or at least being her best self. It worked for Cinderella, didn’t it?
Finally, readers who appreciate original, self-revelatory writing will find much to savor here. Patchwork is short. Read slowly, read twice. Consider it as long-form free verse. There’s style and substance here. As Ballard says, “text and textile are both works of weaving.” Patchwork, like all good writing, deepens with mindful reading and full attention.
Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s short fiction has been recognized by the Pushcart Press. Contents Under Pressure was nominated for the National Book Award; her love story collection is Known By Heart. Her novel The Bowl with Gold Seams won the Indy Excellence Award for Historical Fiction. Frieda’s Song was a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award, Historical Fiction. A member of The National Book Critics Circle, she blogs as “Girl Writing” in the Washington Independent Review of Books. Campbell practiced psychotherapy for many years. She lives in Washington, D.C. and Manns Choice, Pennsylvania. Her new novel, The Vanishing Point, will appear in Spring 2026.
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