Invisible Threads

By Sharon Heath

What kinds of threads make up the fabric of a family? What are the stories we tell ourselves about them? And how do they intertwine with the time and place of our birth, the trials and triumphs of our ancestors, the vicissitudes of our larger human family? Was Leo Tolstoy’s narrator of Anna Karenina right? Are happy families really all alike? And what is a happy family, anyway?

Most families are a complex weave of bloodlines, fault lines, ancient and recent history, shared values and beliefs, secret grudges and betrayals, unspoken longings, guilt and envy, dashed and realized dreams. 

Here’s where my novel Invisible Threads comes in. 

Invisible Threads—a family love story

In 1923, a young Russian-Jewish boy arrives in America penniless and suffering from rickets, only to rise over the years to prominence as a politically radical Hollywood screenwriter. In 2000, the disease that killed his beloved first wife now threatens his oldest daughter. Forty-year-old Evvie Kerr has been a caretaker all her life. Cooking nightly for her less-than-grateful father Michael. Serving as a mother figure to her firecracker of a younger sister Miriam and her sensitive teenage nephew Ben. Ministering to the ailing seniors at the care home she manages. 

Evvie has lived under a cloud of guilt and worry ever since her mother’s achingly long illness, and she probes at her long ago rejection by her first love like an eternally loose tooth. While her salty-tongued best friend partners with a world class photojournalist to document the impacts of war on children, Evvie’s heart is stolen by an endearing little girl also undergoing treatment at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. 

Invisible Threads feels its way through the web and woof of the Kerr family, but no family exists in a vacuum. The Kerrs find communion and commiseration, laughter and joy in an extended tribe that includes Michael’s closest friend and hopelessly romantic writing partner Dick Shea; Michael’s second wife, the flamboyantly weaver, Moira O’Shaughnessy; and the girls’ next door neighbor while growing up, the gorgeous Beady Blanchette, a brilliant documentary filmmaker who’s mother to Tony, Ben’s best friend and co-conspirator in adolescent rebellion. 

As fate presents Evvie with profound loss, the possibility of a new love, and exposure to the devastation of global conflict, she is challenged to weave her way through familiar patterns of self-doubt and sacrifice to allow herself the mystery of being birthed anew.