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Notes Made While Falling Kindle Edition

by Jenn Ashworth (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 36 ratings
See all formats and editions
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.

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  1. Part of series
    Goldsmiths Press
  2. Print length
    200 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  5. Publisher
    Goldsmiths Press
  6. Publication date
    November 5, 2019
  7. File size
    1165 KB
  8. Page Flip
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  9. Word Wise
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  10. Enhanced typesetting
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Editorial Reviews

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

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.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B08BT7YDSR
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Goldsmiths Press (November 5, 2019)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 5, 2019
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 1165 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 200 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 36 ratings

About the author

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Jenn Ashworth

Jenn Ashworth

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Jenn Ashworth was born in 1982 in Preston. She studied English at Cambridge and since then has gained an MA from Manchester University, trained as a librarian and run a prison library in Lancashire. She now lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Lancaster. Her first novel, A KIND OF INTIMACY, was published in 2009 and won a Betty Trask Award. Her second, COLD LIGHT, was published by Sceptre in 2011 and she was chosen by BBC's The Culture Show as one of the twelve Best New British Novelists. Her most recent novels are THE FRIDAY GOSPELS and FELL. She lives in Lancaster with her husband, son and daughter.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
36 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

There are 0 reviews and 3 ratings from the United States

Top reviews from other countries

Mr. A. H. Steiner
5.0 out of 5 stars A haunting and searching memoir of emotional and physical trauma
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 2, 2020
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I can't recommend this book highly enough, Jenn Ashworth reflects upon the body horror of a difficult pregnancy and recovery operation, while looking back on her Mormon upbringing and her difficult relationship with her parents. This book reflects back upon the act of writing itself in Jenn's role as an author and lecturer and it sits in the growing fashion of creative non-fiction with Jenn acknowledging her reference points of Joanna Hevda and Anne Boyer.

I love the genreless state of this book and found some solace in Jenn's accout of troubling and painful experiences, as a book that exists almost in spite of itself, this a must-read experiment in new forms of writing, reading, and understanding.
One person found this helpful
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Robbie Red
5.0 out of 5 stars Wow
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 19, 2022
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Stunning writing & an engrossing read… another brilliant piece from Ashworth
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Christina G.
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliantly written and thought provoking
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 17, 2021
Verified Purchase
Loved this book and it’s innovative structure. One that will stay with me for a long time.
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