Comparative Indian literature
Andrea Ashworth's father stopped on the way home from work one night to take a leak. He slipped in some mud, hit his head on a rock and drowned face-down in a stream less than four inches deep. Andrea was five years old; her sister was three; her mother was twenty-five. This was the beginning of a new life for Andrea: a succession of stepfathers, often violent; a poverty-stricken itinerant childhood spent with various relations all over Manchester; a brief emigration to Canada. Her mother was prone to black depressions, and Andrea frequently found herself looking after her younger sister and step-sister. She learned to escape through reading anything she could get her hands on. Once, in a House on Fire is a remarkable memoir of a child's resistance to the cruelty of her surroundings. It is shocking in its immediacy, as well as for the clarity and beauty of Andrea Ashworth's prose. It is also a stunning evocation of the north of Engiand, and of the 1970s.
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Review:
In her engrossing memoir, Once in a House on Fire, Andrea Ashworth recalls growing up poor in a violent English household during the 1970s and 1980s. Ashworth's father drowned when she was just 5. Her mother then married a man who beat her frequently and made life miserable for the whole family. When Ashworth's mother finally got rid of him, she married a small-time criminal who also soon became violent. Throughout her childhood, the author struggled to protect her little sisters from their stepfathers and kept the family going when their mother could not function because of her injuries, depressions, and blinding headaches. Ashworth and her family moved around quite a bit, often living in other people's houses, sleeping in cots or on floors. They all suffered from the emotional and economic instability of their situation. Ashworth recalls the sunglasses her mother wore through cloudy dark English winters to conceal her bruised eyes. She also remembers sneaking out of the house one day to run through a rich neighborhood, where she paused occasionally to open the mailboxes of the wealthy and smell their comfort and safety.
About the Author:
Although Ashworth's story is all about loneliness and love gone wrong, the surprising thing is that this book is not always terribly sad-- there are interludes when the children have fun and in those sunny moments it seems probable that all of them, especially Andrea, will survive more or less intact. Ashworth recalls the details of her childhood vividly, in brief scenes. In one of those scenes, two sisters race down a cobbled street at breakneck speed. Each of them has one roller skate on--they are sharing. Ashworth's writing is crisp, her dialogue right to the point. This book is reminiscent of Frank Conroy's Stop-Time and Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life, both classic memoirs of adolescence. --Jill Marquis
Andrea Ashworth was born in Manchester in 1969. She now lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.
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- PublisherMacmillan India
- ISBN 10 0333907833
- ISBN 13 9780333907832
- BindingAudio Cassette
- Rating
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