Heartfelt Hobbies: How Our Pastimes Change Us

Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater by Peggy Orenstein (2024)

The pandemic is in full bloom, and Peggy Orenstein’s life has been turned upside down—her book tour cancelled, her life curtailed by lockdowns. Teetering on the edge of 60, she dreads her daughter’s departure for college, faces her husband’s retirement, and fears her father’s descent into dementia.

Facing these challenges, she longs for the comfort of connection with her mother, with the past, with something that can ground her—but Peggy’s mom died years ago. So she begins to knit, seeking connection through her mother’s favorite hobby.

As the months of COVID isolation drag on, a wild idea hatches in Peggy’s brain. Her ancestors homesteaded in North Dakota, and she’d often imagined what life was like for them. Not only that, but the Little House novels were some of her favorite books as a child.

What would it be like for Peggy to create a sweater from start to finish, without the help of modern technology? What if she learned to shear a sheep, spin the wool into yarn, dye the yarn with plant-based dyes, and then knit that yarn into a sweater? What would she learn about herself and the world she lives in—this crazy, virus-ridden, climate-changing world—if she actually learned those skills?

Unraveling is the story of Peggy’s personal journey through both the crisis of the pandemic and the tumult of her shifting identity, told through the hobby she loves the most.

41-Love, a Memoir: On Addictions, Tennis, and Refusing to Grow Up by Scarlett Thomas (2022)

Competitiveness surges through Scarlett Thomas’s blood—she’s focused on being the best, the brightest, the strongest. She’d built a successful career as a novelist and been published numerous times, even short-listed for a few prestigious prizes. But in 2014, at the height of her career as both a writer and university professor, she succumbed to a strange, sudden urge to resurrect a childhood dream: to become a tennis ace.

As a young teenager, she excelled at tennis. Coaches, friends and family showered her with praise, citing an unusual talent. Yet when at age fourteen she struggled to win matches against her boarding school classmates, her confidence was so shaken that she gave up the sport, convinced she’d been wrong to believe in herself.

Now, at age 42, out of shape and busy with teaching classes and finishing a writing project, she becomes obsessed with picking up a racket again. She joins a local tennis club and finds a coach who she hopes can help her resurrect her abilities and perhaps achieve the impossible—become a nationally ranked player.

Even for the sports-disinterested, Thomas’s story of obsession and the need to excel is riveting—as much for the ferociousness with which she pursues her goal of playing on the courts of Wimbledon as it is for the emotional upheavals she experiences along the way. Brutally honest and surprisingly open, 41-Love is a testament to what unresolved losses can do to a settled life.