HOOKED

A Tony Award–winning actor explores crafting as therapy.

Foster’s grounded, heartfelt, and family-focused memoir is rooted in the art projects she’s been creating (and selling) since learning how to crochet at 19 during a 1995 national tour with Grease. Each creation has a purpose and is inspired by a specific significant moment. “These hobbies,” she writes, “have literally preserved my sanity through some of the darkest periods of my life….My crafts have helped hold me together and given me a place to pour all of my love or sadness into.” The author hails from a crafting family: Her mother, grandmother, and aunt all knitted, crocheted, and cross-stitched (what she calls her “gateway craft”), and she proudly carries on that tradition in handcrafting items for her adopted daughter as an expression of parental love and to foster a more creative connection. Foster also writes about how she and her brother were both groomed for musical theater groups and aggressively encouraged to perform. Despite garnering immense stage success on Broadway and TV (Thoroughly Modern Millie, Anything Goes, etc.), the author has struggled, like many of us, with anxiety and other mental health issues. Thankfully for Foster, she discovered the calming salve of crafting, which has given her a consistent, centering source of peace and sanity. Crocheted blankets helped her through a divorce and her mother’s declining health, while colorful sketch work soothed her frustrating attempts to start a biological family with her second husband, screenwriter Ted Griffin. Throughout the narrative’s delicately described episodes, Foster dispenses sage advice and shares cookie recipes, blanket instructions, and the story behind her “graphgan,” which creatively fused her drawings with her crochet career. Foster’s fans will delight in this inspiring story of the multitalented actor’s heights and pitfalls, while crafters will discover newfound purpose, embedded meaning, and shared serendipity in their universal pastime.

An intimate, moving mosaic of art and memoir.