Jenn Ashworth - Notes Made While Falling reviewed by playwright Zoe Lewis

Jenn Ashworth’s book is a stunning read, if not purely for the bravery of the concept.  Written whilst recovering from life-threatening illness suffered during the birth of her second child, ‘Notes’ is part auto-biography, part dive into the stormy waters of post-traumatic stress.  Yet to frame it in terms of category is to do the book down.

‘Notes’ opens with the author on a gurney, after a C-section goes wrong suddenly haemorrhaging blood as if her major organs were pouring out, she could hear litres of her blood hitting the floor whilst doctors frantically attempted to save her life. She was mostly awake and lucid throughout, which is almost incomprehensibly awful.  

In the years since, Ashworth has been blocked, unable to write fiction and her underlying nerves are the sub-text of this book. Yet through her torment she has written something with greater meaning.  ‘Notes..’ is an attempt to merge several literary forms and create something novel, something that often feels like the madness that gripped her - disjointed and irritating, often moving in to ‘academic essay’ mode with which she attempts to unpick various theories around religion including ‘the history of prayer and the physical’.

In parts the book feels dense and crowded as content overflows, but at other times she moves deftly from research topic to anecdotal evidence to memoir and the experiment works perfectly.  Ashworth flits from her own trauma to writers who have inspired her and the traumatic events and illnesses that have afflicted them – such as the train crash suffered by Charles Dickens, when he helped rescue people as the train teetered over a cliff (who knew). These events sit above an undercurrent of fretful spirituality as Ashworth spends time unravelling the Mormon cult to which her mother was slavishly devoted. 

I was impressed by the writer’s knowledge, and spent a large proportion of the time  thinking – ‘gosh doesn’t she know so much for someone so young (younger than me) and ‘gosh hasn’t she achieved a lot’, being a senior lecturer at the University of Lancaster, already having two children and a loving husband who she refers to as “the man I live with”  (this does become slightly annoying and puts me in mind of JK Rowling’s villain who also cannot be named), which is slightly too obtuse.  This is very much her style, deliberately applying oblique brush strokes to describe massive trauma, titillating the reader, unsure if she is allowed to indulge herself by attempting to chart some of the awful self-destructive behaviour over which she has no control. I am sure that this is the author’s intention as she has no idea how to deal with what happened to her noting “having failed to find a beginning and failed to get better, I proceed”. 

‘Notes’ warmed up on the half-way mark as we get more detail of her horrific birth experience and the madness that evolves from the trauma.  Ashworth compares her account to that of other authors writing of their particular agonies.  How should she write of her own? Should she wallow ? Can any of us effectively transmute our pain into art that others can fully comprehend? Ashworth highlights Hilary Mantel’s account of her gruesome wound as a very visceral indulgence, but seems to covet Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Yellow Wallpaper, the profile of a woman cruelly torn from her baby and put on the barbaric ‘rest cure’ in the late nineteenth century, she draws parallels between the cruelty demonstrated by male doctors toward women suffering post-partum trauma and her own brutally botched surgery and resulting lack of sensitivity of the maternity healthcare team toward her.  As she effectively lay dying after receiving the wrong blood in transfusion she was constantly visited by smiling nurses who said “Don’t worry the baby’s fine” (enough to send any woman mad).

The trouble I had at times was to grasp exactly how Jenn suffered. She doesn’t fully explain her symptoms, preferring to use the structure of the book to reflect her inability to stay in one place, hold a thought or simply be.  She describes her affliction as like ‘falling backwards and never landing’ but we are left wondering then how she manages to be both unhinged, (an insomniac self-medicating with wine night and day binge watching serial killer videos) and a successful writer and mother. I wanted more detail, as it is in the descriptions of the birth and aftermath that the book leaps to life, and I felt myself holding out for those sections, wanting to know more.  

As I tossed and turned within the pages, feeling alternately hungry then satisfied with the stop/start structure,  bullet-point passages with hashtag numbering and non-sequiturs, suddenly and rather poetically, in italic font, Ashworth reveals the violent abuse she suffered at the hands of her father. He was a pathologically aggressive man whom her mother finally left after years of torture.  The lack of emotion with which the author tells her story and how she still occasionally drives past her father, a sad lonely figure, walking his dog in the town where she still lives, is a horrific expose of the hidden scars of domestic abuse. The violence may end, but the perpetrator, often a family member, remains. 

What the author lost in her illness was part of her identity and is grasping for it in the dark. She  constantly returns to the motif of the Chernobyl disaster as a metaphor for her nebulous grief,  brilliantly painted through the nostalgic recollection of how the children evacuated from Pripyat and relocated to Preston were referred to as ‘glow-worms’.  Ashworth reminds us that the Chernobyl plant still exists, a commemorative statue of how close we came to oblivion. Nowadays it radiates quietly underneath a vast concrete lid, a ‘sort of mausoleum’ to the ills of man. Ashworth’s ‘Notes’ is a vivid, incisive glimpse into a very personal battle with insanity and how difficult it is to write.