Before the plan went awry, British novelist Margaret Drabble believed she would retire from writing fiction a calmed and contented person, and “become a jigsaw expert.” To that end, she would write a history of the jigsaw puzzle. She pictured producing a work that would make “a pleasing Christmas present . . . Unlike two of my later novels, [it] would not upset or annoy anybody. It didn’t work out that way,” she reveals in a new book.

Shortly after conceiving of the project, her husband, Michael Holroyd, was diagnosed with an advanced cancer that led to two major operations and a regime of radiation and chemotherapy. “As the months went by,” Drabble confesses, “I felt myself sinking into the paranoia and depression from which I thought I had at last emerged.”

Holroyd’s medical ordeal weakened his immune system, leaving the couple mostly housebound. Drabble set up a jigsaw workstation in their London home. “I could pass a painless hour or two, assembling little pieces of cardboard into a preordained pattern, and thus regain an illusion of control.” However, instead of gathering facts for her jigsaw history, she found her mind kept wandering back to her childhood and the evenings she spent with her aunt Phyllis, her mother’s younger sister, who always found room on her messy kitchen table to lay out the pieces of a jigsaw.
The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws is “not a memoir,” Drabble explains in the foreword, “although parts of it may look like a memoir. Nor is it a history of the jigsaw, although that is what it was once meant to be. It is a hybrid,” she writes, explaining, “I have never been a tidy writer.”

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