Review: Invisible Threads by Margaret Carpenter Arnett

Margaret Carpenter Arnett’s heartfelt memoir, Invisible Threads, is the story of a woman, a mother, and an artist that unfolds in an intimate journalistic style, embedded with dreams, poems, paintings, Bible passages, and I Ching texts – the invisible threads that stitch the artist’s tales together.

Carpenter Arnett’s story begins in 1935 in Southwick, England where she was born, quickly followed by her brother and sisters. Their sheltered childhood in idyllic rural England was soon shaken by WWII, as Carpenter Arnett recalls hiding under the stairs while the Luftwaffe roared in the sky and bombs dropped all around her. Her instinct for helping others developed in those formative years and as a young woman she started her studies to become a nurse – a thread of empathy that can be found throughout the memoir.

With her career set on track and an engagement to be married, Arnett’s life might seem already written, but an opportunity arises for her to work in the US that changes her life forever. Though in a land far away from her home and beloved family, Margaret doesn’t hesitate and jumps into her new adventure – a trait that she will keep until the end – and walks on towards the many surprises in store for her.

Through the good and the bad, Carpenter Arnett shows remarkable grace, battling with loss, grief, and solitude, while gathering lessons along the way. Already an accomplished painter, she began to work as an art therapist and became a pioneer in this emerging field, putting together her two greatest passions. Her new job and newly found independence brought her to lead a meditative, kind, and full life, traveling the US and the world. Her natural propensity for introspection, generosity, and nurturing those around her turns into her philosophy of life, which she conveys with the same care and grace she put into her life.

From a childhood imbued by the teachings of a parish priest father to the faith of a mature woman who has studied philosophies from all around the world and enriched her vision of the self and the divine, this memoir is fundamentally a book about spiritual growth. All of the spiritual, religious, and philosophical reflections in the book are tied to real-life events and everyday challenges – spirituality is looked at subjectively, candidly, and without any presumption of universality, for a poignant and inspiring perspective.

This theme can also be found in the artwork throughout the book, comprising 30 reproductions of her life’s work, which reflect the background of the artist and the connection to people and places in her life, as expounded in the text. Carpenter Arnett’s work channels something of Frank W. Benson’s American light in the textured approach to her portraits, but the landscapes have a wistful quality summoning Laura Knight’s fields, betraying the artist’s English roots, with delicate birds and shores as lovely as leaves and water. Each piece expresses Carpenter Arnett’s awe for nature and brings each setting to vivid life, illustrating her maturation over time, as also revealed in the prose.

The overall feeling while reading this memoir is unmistakably the one of peering through someone’s private and intimate diary. While this provides a richness of detail seldomly found in memoirs, it also doesn’t flow as a traditional narrative, and the more compelling writing sometimes gets lost in a barrage of extraneous information. The book could be trimmed to allow the moments of emotional heft to emerge more clearly, while expanding the diaristic style could help the reader not get lost in memories. That said, the book has a cohesive throughline of organic intellectual and emotional growth, in part because of its narrative looseness, reflecting the peaks and valleys of life.

On the whole, Invisible Threads reads like an act of therapy where the reader grows along with the author, gaining from Carpenter Arnett’s learned wisdom. Perceptive to dreams, signs, and revelations on one hand, and refreshingly down-to-earth on the other, this wholly original memoir is a compelling story of a life lived to the fullest, in both the inner and outer world.