Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter

by Nina MacLaughlin

Overview

"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." —Rosie Schaap, author of Drinking with Men

A warm and inspiring book for anyone who has ever dreamed of changing tracks, Hammer Head is the story of a young woman who quit her desk job to become a carpenter. Writing with infectious curiosity, Nina MacLaughlin—a Classics major who couldn’t tell a Phillips from a flathead screwdriver—describes the joys and frustrations of making things by hand. Filled with the wisdom of writers from Ovid to Mary Oliver and MacLaughlin’s own memorable accounts of working with wood, unfamiliar tools, and her unforgettable mentor, Hammer Head is a passionate book full of sweat, bashed thumbs, and a deep sense of finding real meaning in work and life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393352320
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	02/21/2016
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Nina MacLaughlin lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 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.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

Chapter 1 Tape Measure 3

On the distance between here and there

Chapter 2 Hammer 37

On the force of the blow

Chapter 3 Screwdriver 79

On screwing and screwing up

Chapter 4 Clamp 117

On the necessity of pressure

Chapter 5 Saw 143

On severing a part from the whole

Chapter 6 Level 189

On shifting, settling, and shifting again

Epilogue 219

Acknowledgments 223

Editorial Reviews

"Riveting…MacLaughlin weaves together layers of history and literature that lift her memoir beyond a personal narrative and into one of all human knowledge."

Time Out New York - Tiffany Gibert

"MacLaughlin…is a master writer, with the rare combination of acute observation and astute word choice that characterizes writers like Annie Dillard or Joan Didion."

Boston Globe - Rebecca Steinitz

"Nina MacLaughlin built a dream by becoming a carpenter, and transformed her life. Hammer Head is her exquisitely inspiring story. I loved it."

Lynne Cox

"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. I loved it from beginning to end."

Philip Connors

"Reading Hammer Head, like consuming Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, feels like a crucial education."

Entertainment Weekly - Isabella Biedenharn

10/20/2014
A 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.)

Publishers Weekly

"Hammer Head is 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."

Rosie Schaap

"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."

Molly Birnbaum

"Inspiring."

(Critics Pick) Time Out

"MacLaughlin has hit the nail on the head… Stunning… You may very well read [Hammer Head] in one sitting."

Bustle - Caroline Goldstein

"Beautiful and wise… Like if Annie Dillard had her own show on HGTV."

The Millions - Edan Lepucki

"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!"

Andre Dubus III

"Inspirational… [Hammer Head] will have Wild fans throwing down their backpacks and picking up a hammer."

Book Riot - Liberty Hardy

★ 06/01/2015
Whiling 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

Library Journal

2014-12-06
A 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.

Kirkus Reviews