Revisiting Jocelyn Moorhouse’s ‘How To Make An American Quilt’

“I think the hardest part of life is being friends with a woman.”

That appears to be one of the main plot points of Jocelyn Moorhouse’s How to Make an American Quilt, a film from 1995 focusing on the fragile relationships between elderly women hanging onto loose-threaded pasts intersecting like stitched pieces of fabric flying in windswept streets. With acting greats Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn, Alfre Woodard, and Winona Ryder headlining Jane Anderson’s adapted screenplay based on a Whitney Otto novel, it would appear to be a winning match in movie heaven.

It begins with master’s student Finn. She is in a bit of a rut, needing to focus on her thesis paper and space away from hovering fiancé, and ultimately decides to spend the summer with Hy, her grandmother and diverse group of quilting bee companions.

Each of the seven women have advice for Finn about love.

However, none of them actually has great relationships with men to speak of: Hy has had an affair with her sister Glady Jo’s husband; Constance is also committing adultery with Em’s lecherous husband who claims that affairs are part of his artist’s passionate nature (BS!); diving lover Sophia’s husband left her with three kids and never came back; ignorant Anna allowed a white man to seduce her; and Jezebel-spirited Marianna believes a married man to be her soul mate.

Men have destroyed some semblance of the women’s integrated worlds, especially Sophia’s (who remains bitter and mournful of lost dreams), but it’s making Finn’s “love quilt” that has them all coming to terms with hurtful wrongs and focusing heavily on positive aspects that love has wrought.

Finn takes in all of their stories and thoughtfully engages critiques of her own frustration, including stern views on the sanctity of marriage, questioning “how do we know that we’re supposed to be with one person all our lives?”

Infidelity plays too big a role in the screenplay, being the reason for crackling tension between Hy and Glady Jo, Constance and Em, and Marianna and that attached man haunting her thoughts, seeming to forsake all others for that innocent memory of being with him at the café. Even Finn succumbs to committing the ultimate betrayal.

It is this need to cheat that weakens the film’s attempt at the female bonding ritual and calls to mind Constance’s earlier comment — “the hardest part of life is being friends with a woman.” Yes! Especially if one lady is building a relationship with another’s husband. The reasons primarily used for slipping into those bedsheets seem to be for more than just comforting connection. Without remorse or compassion for the other woman’s feelings until after the deed is done, disastrous affairs are selfish sacrifices to friendships with severe consequences.

A big nasty illustration is painted here — women cannot be true companions to each other if there is a desirable man in the picture. This creates an unsettled awkwardness pill that is tough to swallow.

However, it is bridging together the “love quilt” that both eases and causes escalation between these seven different women, and Finn watches on, writing her paper while getting an education that isn’t addressed in school textbooks. 

Sewing a gift handed down to her from women ancestors, Anna is naturally the matron leader of the quilt’s composition, having taught most of them how to use needle and thread, and she often evaluates progress with an overtly critical eye. She tends around the house for Glady Jo and Hy but is rarely seen doing chores, often relishing her authority over the quilt, for she is the master of this laudable domain. They all respect and value her opinion and don’t chastise her commanding role. There’s no race or class in quilting!

“Young lovers seek perfection. Old lovers learn the art of sewing shreds together and of seeing beauty in a multiplicity of patches.”

That above quotation was a poem written on scrap of paper for Marianna, Anna’s only daughter, who speaks with French vigor and boasts of photographed conquests. Sex is fun and free to her until punishment is unleashed. For her wicked ways, she carries around that man’s words like a lingering fragrance.

Still, it is Marianna’s sexual independence that further inspires Finn into believing monogamy to be unrealistic and, of course, influences her into that aforementioned curse of being intimate with a strange strawberry stalker.

During seventy-three hours of straight nonstop sewing and drinking iced tea, exchanged looks of kindness, understanding, and forgiveness are passed around, each woman putting their conflicts aside and integrating personal stories into the quilt, silently communicating a deepening bond. 

Em once said, “bicker, bicker, bicker that makes a gal age quicker.”

In candid moments of the power sewing party seven, there’s tender softness reflected in shared smiles and watery eyes that gives them all an endearing youthful countenance. Even Sophia has lightened tremendously and closes the film diving into what still matters in her heart.

How To Make An American Quilt showcases the failures of both genders when in the throes of love and passion but also crafts an intricate, complex portrait on female relationships withstanding testaments of time amongst held grudges, buried wounds, and old pains. The hardest part of life isn’t just forming friendships with women, but keeping them. To retain that camaraderie takes work and dedication — like the artistry found in making a quilt.

At last wrapped up in completed love quilt with Sam, Finn’s closing statement, which were Anna’s own words, couldn’t have been anymore genuinely prolific:

“You have to choose your combination carefully. The right choices will enhance your quilt and the wrong choices will dull the colors, hide their original beauty…”