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Nina MacLaughlin grew up in Massachusetts and lives in Cambridge, where she works as a carpenter. Formerly an editor at the Boston Phoenix, she has written for the Believer, Bookslut, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.
Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter
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ISBN-13:
9780393246469
- Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
- Publication date: 03/02/2015
- Sold by: Barnes & Noble
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 240
- Sales rank: 292,049
- File size: 542 KB
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“Reading Hammer Head, like consuming Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, feels like a crucial education.”—Isabella Biedenharn, Entertainment Weekly
Nina MacLaughlin spent her twenties working at a Boston newspaper, sitting behind a desk and staring at a screen. Yearning for more tangible work, she applied for a job she saw on Craigslist—Carpenter’s Assistant: Women strongly encouraged to apply—despite being a Classics major who couldn't tell a Phillips from a flathead screwdriver. She got the job, and in Hammer Head she tells the rich and entertaining story of becoming a carpenter.
Writing with infectious curiosity, MacLaughlin describes the joys and frustrations of making things by hand, reveals the challenges of working as a woman in an occupation that is 99 percent male, and explains how manual labor changed the way she sees the world. We meet her unflappable mentor, Mary, a petite but tough carpenter-sage (“Be smarter than the tools!”), as well as wild demo dudes, foul-mouthed plumbers, grizzled hardware store clerks, and the colorful clients whose homes she and Mary work in.
Whisking her readers from job to job—building a wall, remodeling a kitchen, gut-renovating a house—MacLaughlin examines the history of the tools she uses and the virtues and varieties of wood. Throughout, she draws on the wisdom of Ovid, Annie Dillard, Studs Terkel, and Mary Oliver to illuminate her experience of work. And, in a deeply moving climax, MacLaughlin strikes out on her own for the first time to build bookshelves for her own father.
Hammer Head is a passionate book full of sweat, swearing, bashed thumbs, and a deep sense of finding real meaning in work and life.
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Publishers Weekly
10/20/2014A Boston newspaperwoman transformed herself into a carpenter’s assistant and found new satisfaction working with her hands rather than molding words. In her light narrative, in which the former classics major wisely and sparingly employs allusions to Ovid and Vitruvius, MacLaughlin recounts her quirky journey, after seven years at the Phoenix, to landing an improbable job at age 30 as assistant to the highly trained carpenter, Mary, a petite, self-described “43-year-old married lesbian.” Mary’s patience and encouragement on numerous jobs in the Boston area, like kitchen and bathroom renovations, moving walls, tiling and ripping out floors and stairs, over many seasons with MacLaughlin allowed the author to grow and learn and even master carpentry work on her own. The author quotes Gabriel García Márquez calling literature “nothing but carpentry.... With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood,” yet Márquez had actually never worked with wood, while the author finds enormous release in hands-on labor free of words. Moreover, women make up only about 2% of the male-dominated profession of carpenter, MacLaughlin cites, thus rendering enormous interest in this painstaking work so lovingly delineated. (Mar.)
Philip Connors
In this beautiful memoir about learning a trade, Nina MacLaughlin explores mortality, desire, the passage of time, and the meaning of work. She transcends the personal and makes us question what of our own works are built to endure. This book—a thing well-made—certainly is.Andre Dubus III
Not many of us find the courage to follow that small voice inside us to our true work, especially when that work lacks social status and health benefits and financial stability. But here, in this wonderfully assured debut, Nina MacLaughlin compellingly chronicles having done just that, a leap of faith that brings her more deeply into her very core where the stakes are high but the potential for lasting joy is even higher. Lucky for us, MacLaughlin's evocative prose is just as plumb, level, and true as all the wood structures she ultimately learns to build. This is a lovely and important book!Rosie Schaap
Warm, wise, and authentically inspiring. No other book has made me want to re-read Ovid and retile my bathroom floor, nor given me the conviction that I can do both. I loved it.”Molly Birnbaum
I have never built anything but after reading Nina MacLaughlin's smart, inspiring memoir Hammer Head, I wanted to. She gives context and depth to wood and the act of shaping it, of working with one's hands, of taking risks and letting go. A fantastic debut.”Lynne Cox
Nina MacLaughlin built a dream by becoming a carpenter, and transformed her life. Hammer Head is her exquisitely inspiring story. I loved it.”Liberty Hardy - Book Riot
Inspirational . . . will have Wild fans throwing down their backpacks and picking up a hammer.”Caroline Goldstein - Bustle
MacLaughlin has hit the nail on the head… Stunning… You may very well read [Hammer Head] in one sitting.”Edan Lepucki - The Millions
Beautiful and wise. . . . Like if Annie Dillard had her own show on HGTV.Rebecca Steinitz - Boston Globe
Though MacLaughlin may be an apprentice carpenter, she is a master writer, with the rare combination of acute observation and astute word choice that characterizes writers like Annie Dillard or Joan Didion.Isabella Biedenharn - Entertainment Weekly
Reading Hammer Head, like consuming Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, feels like a crucial education… [Hammer Head teaches] by example that it’s possible to forge through this world alone, with your own hands and the right supplies, and some good, poetic instruction along the way.”Time Out
Inspiring.Library Journal
★ 06/01/2015Whiling away her days as a journalist at the Boston Phoenix, MacLaughlin watches her industry shift from respecting deadlines to prizing page clicks. After having spent most of her 20s working from a computer chair, she decides to quit in favor of a more hands-on vocation: carpenter's assistant. MacLaughlin's memoir traces her first years apprenticing for Mary, a skilled craftswoman who takes the author under her wing despite her lack of training. VERDICT Because of MacLaughin's years of experience as a writer, the crown molding on her story is her effortless blending of literary craft with woodcraft. [See Memoir, 12/16/14; ow.ly/MBEsA.]—ES
Kirkus Reviews
2014-12-06A former journalist tells the story of how a longing to "engage with the tangible, to do work that resulted in something I could touch" led to an unexpectedly fulfilling career as a carpenter. As she neared 30, former Boston Phoenix editor MacLaughlin came to the painful realization that the job she once thought was "the coolest job in the world" no longer satisfied her. The woman who had lucked into a job straight out of college now stirred with a powerful desire for "the wholesale altering of life as [she'd] been living it." So she quit her newspaper job and answered a Craigslist advertisement for a carpenter's assistant. The carpenter doing the search, also a woman, took a chance and hired MacLaughlin, despite her total lack of experience. Soon, the former journalist who had spent her entire working life sitting in front of a computer screen was actively using her body and hands to transform residential living spaces. Learning how to use tools like tape measures, hammers, saws and drills was as challenging as coming to terms with the desexualizing nature of a profession overwhelmingly dominated by men. For the first time in her life, MacLaughlin realized just how "attached to [her] femininity" she really was. Through the screw-ups, successes and fallow periods that left her questioning her decision to leave a steady job, the author gained new confidence, both as a woman and a carpenter. She also discovered unexpected pleasure in dissolving "into something greater than" herself. MacLaughlin's work let her connect to the physical world in ways that writing—which only touched the surface of things through the "ghosty and mutable" medium of words—could not. More than that, it allowed her to "feel more honest, more useful, and more used." A surprisingly thoughtful book about taking chances and finding joy in change.