Mendings

“Marrying memoir, family history, and a fresh and innovative understanding of the significance and function of women’s handiwork, Mendings is an intimate and cathartic book. With candor and sincerity, Megan Sweeney does the difficult work of coming to terms with a complicated family while allowing for a wider vision about how clothing, dress, redress, and mending might allow readers to understand their own family dynamics and forms of dress.” - Karen Elizabeth Bishop, Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature, Rutgers University

“Mendings is a beautiful, evocative, heart-rending book that has been written with care and craft. Courageously honest and self-revealing, Megan Sweeney’s narrative voice arrives with a startling immediacy. A daring, experimental, hybrid work of theory and meditation, Mendings is a relentless personal reflection and family memoir.” - Tiya Miles, author of All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

"An evocative meditation on how garments can foster communication." - Nathalie Atkinson, Everything Zoomer

"A text bursting with stories of familial wear, tear, and repair writ large on keepsakes. . . . As equal parts memoir and scholarly inquiry, Mendings challenges its readers to take clothing seriously, not only as a medium for personal expression or interpersonal connection but as a conduit toward greater social understanding and participation. I experience this text and its challenge as ethical and spiritual in nature." - Céire Kealty, Christian Century

"At the heart of Mendings is a powerful refusal of seamlessness. . . . Sweeney ultimately offers mending as a form of ethical act, a process of ‘always being ready to embrace the immanent ethical, communal, and collective possibilities that can emerge from disaster, being poised to find plenty amid barrenness, scarcity, and irrecoverable loss’ (p. 172). Echoing her approach to her father’s obituary, the purpose here is not to fix things, to create a whole, or to form a totality. Instead, it is to live while recognizing the holes, to find meaning notwithstanding wreckage." - Stephanie Clare, Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

"Mendings stands out among academic publications for its open embrace of subjectivity and exploration. . . . To Sweeney, clothing is a complex text worthy of many different modes of inquiry. It is a physical boundary, a personal armor, a document of the past, an exuberant display of agency, and a vital part of constructing and mending oneself." - Anna Rose Keefe, Winterthur Portfolio