Cross Stitch by Jazmina Barrera

My grandmother always used a thimble. She was taught to embroider by her aunt in the small Yucatan town where she grew up but didn't discover thimbles until she moved to Merida. She thought they were marvelous and used to say that sewing machines, washing machines, and thimbles had changed her life. I never found thimbles comfortable to wear, but there was a period when I spent so much time embroidering that I got calluses on my fingertips, and if I pricked myself, the needle would never go deep enough to draw blood. Citlali would give a nervous giggle when I'd ask her to prick me to demonstrate the quality of my calluses. Remembering her laughter makes me want to laugh too, but I stop myself so as not to wake my daughter, who's sleeping in the next room while I embroider her name on the backpack she needs for her first day at nursery school. Laughter has to be one of the hardest things in the world to hold back, almost harder than tears.

Mila, the narrator of Jazmina Barrera's Cross Stitch, receives terrible news: Citlali, her old friend from high school, has drowned off the coast of Senegal. Mila arranges for the reception and disposal of Citlali's ashes with a ceremonial gathering of her friends, but the painful loss brings back a rush of memories, divided into what you might call--appropriately, given the novel's title and central motifs--two threads. First, the high school friendship between Citlali, Mila, and beautiful, much-desired Dalia. Second, a college trip to London and Paris, in which Mila and Dalia go looking for Citlali, whom they worry is in distress. When they find her in Paris, the three have the first adult adventure of their lives, but their worries are not misplaced, as Citlali shows repeated signs of an eating disorder. Though her later death in Senegal seems accidental, the trip seems to foreshadow their friend's ultimate disintegration--perhaps, unraveling.

I was really charmed by Jazmina Barrera's On Lighthouses, a mix of memoir, autofiction, and non-fiction essay. I found it both thoughtful and scrupulous, drawing on an impressive number of historical, geographic, and fictional sources on the subject of lighthouses. Cross Stitch, though more pointedly fictional, is a little like that, too: interspersed with--I guess I have to say woven, right?--the main narrative are many brief snippets about embroidery and sewing. Like On Lighthouses, the sources are innumerable and diverse. Barrera draws from Mayan cultural practices, modern feminist artists like Louise Bourgeois and Leticia Parente, medical textbooks, and fiction novels like Jane Eyre and my beloved Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

In one way, these pieces speak to the embroidery pursuits of the three girls, who bond over it, but in a symbolic way, they suggest an image of life as something woven together. The fabrics of life, perhaps, are threaded together from the lives of others. It's a cheesy way of putting it, but perhaps one point is that, though a thread may be cut, it reminds part of the larger fabric, where it intersects with other lives, other memories. Citlali remains woven in the fabric of the narrator's life. Nor is it lost that sewing and stitching are, in medical and garment contexts, a kind of healing that knits broken things together. It's a testament to Barrera's skill and the novel's thoughtfulness and gentleness that the book is not cheesy. The symbol, which might otherwise seem hackneyed or cliche--after all, the image of life as a thread goes back to the ancient Greeks--is renewed and invigorated by the essay portions of the novel.