Notes Made While Falling (Goldsmiths Press) - Hardcover

Ashworth, Jenn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1912685191 ISBN 13: 9781912685196

Publisher: Goldsmiths Press, 2019

Synopsis

A genre-bending meditation on sickness, spirituality, creativity, and the redemptive powers of writing.

Notes Made While Falling is both a genre-bending memoir and a cultural study of traumatized and sickened selves in fiction and film. It offers a fresh, visceral, and idiosyncratic perspective on creativity, spirituality, illness, and the limits of fiction itself. At its heart is a story of a disastrously traumatic childbirth, its long aftermath, and the out-of-time roots of both trauma and creativity in an extraordinary childhood.

Moving from fairgrounds to Agatha Christie, from literary festivals to neuroscience and the Bible, from Chernobyl to King Lear, Ashworth takes us on a fantastic journey through familiar landscapes transformed through unexpected encounters and comic combinations. The everyday provides the ground for the macabre and the absurd, as the narration twists and stretches time. Hovering on the edge of madness, writing, it seems, might keep us sane―or might just allow us to keep on living.

In Notes Made While Falling, Ashworth calls for a redefinition of the creative work of thinking, writing, teaching, and being, and she underlines the necessity of a fearlessly compassionate and empathic attention to vulnerability and fragility.

About this title

About the Author

Jenn Ashworth is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and author of the novels A Kind of Intimacy, Cold Light,The Friday Gospels, and Fell. She is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University.

Review

What kind of book does a sick woman who cannot write actually write?' This is the question at the centre of the book, a book that is, among other things, a meditation on aesthetic imperatives and the quandaries of working in fictive or non-fictive modes, especially when the subject is one borne of the body of the writer and of trauma. This is a book that writers and readers will love to think with at the same time that they experience the rhythms and textures of the writing itself.

―Mary Cappello, author of Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack

This exceptional book cracks open the complexity of human experience, exploring how to live and inhabit a body in the aftermath of trauma and loss. Ashworth expertly weaves the broader world into her story, threading art, writing, philosophy and history, from Dickens to Mantel, Freud to Anne Boyer. Notes Made While Falling is an evocative and profound meditation on living, art and survival.

―Sinéad Gleeson, author of Constellations

This is a really important unique visceral book about birth, trauma and new motherhood. I found the opening pages to be the most moving description of the kind of trauma many women face in childbirth in 2019 in the United Kingdom. It's raw and authentic, and it moved me to tears and to rage. We need to make our system of maternity care better.

―Dr Rebecca Moore, consultant perinatal psychiatrist and co-founder of Make Birth Better

Edition details

• Publisher: Goldsmiths Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1912685191
• ISBN 13: 9781912685196
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 200