The Goodbye Quilt

Published: 2011
Language: English

Linda Davis is driving her daughter Molly across the country to start college, and she is torn between excitement for Molly and heartache for herself. Linda gave up her own dream of college when she married and had Molly, and over the years she settled on quilting as her craft.

On the road she works on a quilt stitched from scraps of Molly's young life, including the hem of a christening gown and snippets of old costumes. The pieces become an inventory of everything she is handing over.

Susan Wiggs's short novel, well under two hundred pages, is about the empty nest from the mother's side: the challenge of letting go, and the uncertainty of the life waiting for Linda when she drives home alone.

Prose complexity: 1/10

Emotional Nostalgic Reflective Hopeful

Road Trip

Women's Fiction Contemporary Romance Travel Contemporary Literature

Susan Wiggs

Using blunt scissors, pages from a Big Chief tablet, a borrowed stapler and a Number Two pencil, Susan Wiggs self-published her first novel at the age of eight. A Book About Some Bad Kids [I still have this-CL] was based on the true-life adventures of Susan and her siblings, and the first printing of one copy was a complete sell-out. Due to her brother's extreme reaction to that first prodigious effort, Susan went underground with her craft, entertaining her friends and offending her siblings...