In my latest novel, The Keepsake Quilters, two of the principal characters, working in different locations, create a reversable patchwork quilt. Marguerite and Val are mother and daughter, and the quilt is for Val’s daughter Penny, a career-driven TV producer who, in her late twenties, has unexpectedly found herself pregnant. It’s a keepsake for the coming baby – an heirloom composed of scraps of fabrics treasured by four generations of a family of strong, and largely inarticulate, women.
The book is about fashion, fabric, exploitation, painters, quilters and family, and the need to
escape from guilt and the past and engage with a positive future. There’s a tragi-comic
celebrity-chef villain, a quiet hero (because, if you ask me, the quiet ones are the most
romantic), and its structure arose directly from the image of a patchwork quilt.
It began in 2020 in Cork’s Crawford Gallery, with early twentieth century paintings of women in stylish clothes. Painted portraits contain deliberate narratives, presenting the subject to the world in a specific way. I wondered what those women wore when they weren’t dressed up for a sitting in velvets, brocades, satins and gauze, who had decided on their outfits, and how each sitter should pose. Was the decision down to the artist or the woman herself? Perhaps it was down to whoever had laid out hard cash for the portrait? Those decisions also contained stories too – of control, aspiration, relationships, trust or rebellion – expressed in choices of fabric and colour, viewpoint, and juxtaposition of shadow and light.
I left that exhibition with the thematic seeds of a novel. Later, still thinking of clothing in terms of a narrative of power, I realised that the politics and economics of fashion, and textile production, had never really occurred to me in my youth. Later still, recalling smoky purple eyeshadows I’d bought from Biba, and maxi skirts in Laura Ashley fabrics, I wondered what had happened to the clothes I’d worn back then. An economic migrant from Dublin to Ireland in the 1970s, I’ve moved house often and, of necessity, travelled light. But dressmaking offcuts have come with me stuffed in ragbags along with scraps of lace and embroidery ripped from garments that grew too shabby to wear. More effectively than scents or music or Proustian madeleines, these scraps act as stimuli to produce perfect recall of the occasions on which I wore particular clothes. And that fact gave me the starting point for the structure of my novel.
Like a quilt’s, the book’s structure is visible on the surface, intended to form part of the finished work. Echoing the stages of its main characters’ project, it has three sections, called The Pieces, The Patterns and The Quilt. Each begins with a single page – which I’ve called a Thread – expressing one of the three women’s relationships with the fabrics that become the scraps from which Val and Marguerite construct their patchwork. This gave me a broad framework within which to weave a family saga that moves backwards and forwards in time across four generations, with an older quilt, made by Marguerite’s mother, Ruth, at its heart. But any work with a shifting timescale also needs a consistent onward trajectory. So The Keepsake Quilters’ section titles were chosen to suggest sequential movement, from a quilter’s choice of pieces to the design of her pattern, and on to her completed work. And, because my unfolding saga reveals repeated patterns of trauma across generations, I made the central Patterns the longest of the sections, a choice which gave the three-part structure a less rigid shape.
At one point, Marguerite, in Wicklow, and Val, in London, are on the phone discussing their work on the quilt.
Marguerite says: ‘It’s a process, not a race. Thinking-time and selection are as important as the cutting, piecing and quilting.’
Val is frustrated: ‘I guess there ought to be some kind of chronological order in the design. I was thinking of having the oldest pieces at one end – fabrics from things I made for Penny when she was a baby – and working my way along, so the whole thing will tell a story. But I can’t get the colours to work. What are you doing?’
Marguerite replies: ‘Less thinking than you, that’s evident! I suppose I’m just looking at what’s there, laying things out and moving them round. Observing the stories they tell when they’re juxtaposed in different ways. These things take time, and different people approach them differently.’
I was well into my copy edit before I saw that this exchange I’d written for my characters mirrors the construction stage with which every author grapples. The Keepsake Quilters is a standalone written after seven consecutive novels in my “Finfarran” series. My approach to the series, I think, is more like Val’s than Marguerite’s: I work with squared paper and coloured markers and create a detailed chapter chart, before beginning to write. This book was different. Like Marguerite, I laid things out, moved them round and observed the effect of varying juxtapositions. But, even so, I wrote within a framework, firm enough to give me courage to take necessary risks and flexible enough to work with whatever those risks might reveal.
Oh, and, incidentally – Ruth’s quilt is deconstructed to become part of the new patchwork, and her portrait, hanging in the family home to which widowed Marguerite has retired, holds the story of why these three loving women have, until now, repeated so many patterns that kept them silent when they ought to have spoken.
(c) Felicity Hayes-McCoy
Pick up your copy of this gorgeous book here (it makes the perfect gift!) Find out more about Felicity here.
About The Keepsake Quilters:
When London TV producer Penny finds herself unexpectedly pregnant, it throws her carefully thought-out future plans into disarray – and her concerned mother Val’s constant attempts to guide her don’t help to calm her panic.
Meanwhile Penny’s grandmother Marguerite – Val’s widowed mother – has recently returned to her childhood home in Wicklow and is struggling to show her concern for Penny without it looking like disapproval.
Then Marguerite has an idea – she and Val will make a keepsake quilt for the baby, a way of welcoming this new member of the family and keeping themselves distracted until Penny is more receptive to their advice. But as they begin to piece together treasured textiles, Marguerite becomes fascinated by a mysterious portrait of her own mother and Val is forced to confront her feelings about the past…
‘Felicity Hayes McCoy weaves her magic once again in this beautifully observed, warm and wise family saga. The Keepsake Quilters was an absolute joy to read!’ Carmel Harrington
A skilfully woven and heart-warming tale of love, loss and hope spread over four generations. The perfect festive read.’ Roisin Meaney
Grab your copy here. (It really does makes the perfect gift!)
