Reviewed by Melissa Oliviera

“Once I make a quilt,” textile artist Gabriella D’Italia writes in her new memoir Getting Dressed within the Darkish: An Artist’s Approach Dwelling (Unsolicited Press; October 2025), “I begin with a cloth I like and I search for others. Generally it takes over a decade to seek out all the suitable ones. As they kind a pile on the shelf, I preserve a watchful eye on their dialog… Every bit modifications the others, irrevocably.”

It’s the type of assertion that would simply as simply apply to writing a guide or growing a relationship as to quilting: we accumulate paragraphs or experiences and, over time, we see what occurs once we place them beside one another. A memoir might begin as a set of unrelated scenes, scraps of recollections and reflections. It’s by way of the act of placing the items into dialog with others that the broader tapestry of a narrative emerges.

In D’Italia’s case, this story has every thing to do with the thought of dwelling: the one she constructed — actually rebuilt, from the studs out, together with her then-husband Rob — in rural Maine, how that dwelling was later ripped aside, and at last how she pieced collectively one other dwelling from the scraps.

When Getting Dressed within the Darkish opens, we discover D’Italia in a interval of deep emotional turmoil. She is not too long ago divorced and again in her childhood home in New Jersey. This home is not any dwelling, nonetheless; right here, she by no means stops feeling as if she and her 4 canines are intruding on the lifetime of her dad and mom, even after they aren’t there, and there’s no area for the messiness of her grief. The sterile, enameled perfection of her childhood home appears to be the alternative of the one she owned together with her husband in rural Maine: an previous schoolhouse on a wooded lot that she Rob lovingly renovated by hand right into a heat, inviting residing area with gardens, generously open to mates.

This dwelling, The Bell Faculty, developed into an area for neighborhood, the place family members may share their lives and artwork with one another. “Dwelling,” she writes, “is deeply entangled with my sense of id.” Thus, held and guarded by this dwelling, with Rob’s household and a rising neighborhood of artists close by, D’Italia constructed her personal follow making sensible, stunning quilts and transitioning, over years, into extra conceptual textile artwork.

Someday, D’Italia falls in love with Cameron, an artist she meets throughout a residency in coastal Maine. “Earlier than polyamory turned mainstream nomenclature,” and after a lot soul-searching, Cameron joins the connection with D’Italia and Rob. Cameron lives in a unique state, and the trio stays closeted in rural, deeply conservative Maine. The connection lasts for over a decade till an affair between considered one of D’Italia’s mates and Rob brings every thing crashing down: relationship, neighborhood belonging, The Bell Faculty — all of it.

In D’Italia’s phrases, “Rob admitted his affair to his dad and mom, however in the identical breath, eclipsed the previous decade by telling them about our relationship with Cameron, which now was solid as my relationship with Cameron.” The tip is swift and harrowing, and he or she flees Maine together with her canines and with Cameron’s assist. At 40, working as a waitress and with a child on the best way, she begins over once more in New York Metropolis, questioning, “Was the inventive life I’d chosen now accountable for all of this chaos and ache? Was this catastrophe by which I discovered myself a mirror for the way ugly I had develop into?” The time after, and the area of this guide, search indirectly to reply this.

Getting Dressed within the Darkish is split into three elements with 43 shorter chapters. The gathering’s three elements every correspond to an animal with significance for D’Italia, offering a bigger construction and overview of themes. So Half 1: The Turtle, an animal that carries its own residence with it whereas “absorbing what’s exterior in order that she requires this all-but-consuming carapace. She is difficult as a result of she is delicate” grapples with vulnerability and protection, laying out the story of the Bell Faculty rework and her early profession. Half 2: The Heron (which “hunts alone on the edge”) explores the violent finish of that interval and the rocky transition into the properties that adopted. Half 3: The Monarch, takes a wider view, touching extra on inventive transformation and course of. Right here, previous household tales converse together with her current work because the holistic stylist behind Mirror & Lens. Just like the nets she as soon as realized to make, the place “one should tie a collection of knots and join them”, generally, these really feel extra like standalone essays by which associated parts, actions and themes loop and repeat, connecting loosely however remaining in dialog.

One of many hanging issues about this guide is how a lot D’Italia appears to grapple with the conceptual and the bodily: the world of concepts, and that of the physique. Her artwork begins with quilting, a self-discipline that’s so deeply engaged with the tactile, with our bodies: requiring hours of labor with the palms, becoming a member of collectively scraps of fabric to develop into an object to heat and shield different our bodies. But she usually expresses a powerful dissociation from her senses, being “the individual that used the thoughts to keep away from, and even to negate, the physique.” This gulf between the thoughts and the senses does generally sneak into her guide. By way of craft, I used to be hungry for extra scenic storytelling, extra of the senses introduced into the writing. At occasions, I felt faraway from the motion, with some main occasions feeling extra instructed than proven, however at its greatest Getting Dressed within the Darkish is partaking and offers fantastically and exactly with themes of dwelling (as a bodily area, and in a single’s physique) and the challenges of constructing artwork if you spend restricted inventive vitality on making a house as an alternative.

Nonetheless, I most loved the chapters that discuss course of, whether or not that’s the means of renovating a home or making a quilt. “In Between” was considered one of my favorites for that purpose: “It wanted the physique and the thoughts.” She clearly has this unbelievable reward using her senses as an artist and later a stylist, and within the strongest, most shifting elements of the guide D’Italia melds the bodily and the conceptual.

Certainly, “Quilts embody concepts,” D’Italia wrote in 2008 a few piece of hers featured in a guide about one of the best modern quilts. With quilts, you’re by no means removed from the bodily, the fabric, the physique, dwelling. Books by writers on writing are fairly frequent, however I don’t usually discover one which talks in the identical approach about making other forms of artwork in the best way that Getting Dressed within the Darkish: An Artist’s Approach Dwelling by Gabriella D’Italia does. Here’s a quiet, considerate memoir, and the tensions she discusses about art-making, relationships and residential stay as related now as when she was making an attempt to make her own residence within the Maine woods.