grant staley

Is Eunice Tweed Sissons a monster or a victim of circumstance? To Finish a Quilt chronicles her journey from impoverished small-town Kansas teenager to wealthy Southern California matron and examines the human damage she leaves in her wake. Spanning 20th century America, the two-part book blends literary and popular fiction in a story that unfolds through the eyes of a third-person narrator.

In the early pages of Part I, Eunice suffers the worst kind of violation by her father and the experience shapes the path her life will follow. After he takes most of the family’s savings and leaves Eunice, her brother, mother, and grandmother to barely scrape by, Eunice knows that it will be up to her to change their circumstances. She works and saves until she has enough money to move her family to what she believes is the Promised Land. Post-Depression California is a world apart from Kansas farm country and Eunice is determined to seize all it offers. Once settled in the Los Angeles suburb of Pasadena, she and her family fall into a comfortable routine; but mere comfort is not what Eunice sees as her destiny. Grasping for opportunities to gain status and wealth, she marries a much older man and virtually turns her back on her blood relatives. This sets in motion a series of events that profoundly affects all of them, inflicting deep pain on both her younger brother and the son she bears only to please her husband.

Part II reunites Eunice’s brother Tommy (known to all as Tomás in his adopted homeland) with her now-adult son Gary in South America. Tomás is a successful author tortured by long-hidden family secrets while Gary is escaping his unfulfilled life on a quest to understand family events that have left him confused and defeated. The two dance around the issues, Tomás unwilling to dredge up old hurts and failures and Gary desperate for answers only Tomás can provide. Through a series of honest and painful admissions, the two finally reach a point of revelation and peace.

To Finish a Quilt’s epilogue has put readers in two distinct and vocal camps: those who view Eunice as a tragic victim who did not mean to harm anyone in her quest for a better life and those who believe that she used her early trauma as a weapon and deserved the isolation of her final moments.