Notes Made While Falling by Jenn Ashworth

Notes Made While Falling (Goldsmiths Press, 2019)

I made so many notes while reading this that any collated, quick, ideas I toss down here will be superseded by the far more detailed response to this book that I’m currently planning to include within my next long-form literary-performance project, Bald Personality Disorder (tickets available now).

I loved this book.

Truly, truly, truly, truly, I loved it.

It’s about creativity and depression, it’s about literature and addiction, it’s about travel and parenting and Mormomism and true crime and class and culture and the UK and and and and and…

It’s experimental and digressive, while still being direct and taut and tight.

Chapters and ideas and essays split like collapsing buildings but reconnect in often unexpected, yes always satisfying, ways…

Ashworth has such a command of the book in the readers’ hands that any momentary sense of dissolution or confusion is quickly revealed to be a complex (yet simple-feeling) manoeuvre to keep the book, and the ideas within it, fresh.

The premise is that this autobiography, this splintering memoir, is Ashworth’s back-up literary project as she struggles to write a novel following a very traumatic birth (which is survived by both her and the baby, though not without major surgery, huge amounts of blood loss and an error with anaesthesia that leaves her conscious and aware at a moment where best medical (and humanitarian) practice would have her be neither of those things)…

There is a descent into heavy alcoholism and sleeplessness, punctuated by watching YouTube True Crime documentaries throughout the night…

There is the disintegration of a relationship that disintegrates around the pages of the book…

There is a seemingly stable and functional career taking place around this and lots of solid parenting, too…

The loss of time one feels and experiences as an adult once responsibilities pile up is something Ashworth dives into in great detail. How is there time to work, time to care, time to write, time to read, time to create, time to travel, time to be, time to sleep, time to relax, time to have a little intoxicated downtime, time to watch some crap on a screen..?

There isn’t time for all of this, there simply isn’t, so the only solution to try and grab some of the less essential but still wanted Time is to give something else up.

And Ashworth chooses to get rid of sleep, which – as a primary parent who works and writes and performs and tries to cook and tries to read and tries to stay on top of housework and tries to travel and tries to exercise and tries to maintain a long-running “literary lifestyle blog” – sleep always feels like a bit of a waste of time to me, too. 

–///–

This is writing about thought, but also about living.

It is writing about how it feels to be a person who feels, how it feels to be a person who doesn’t want to feel and how it feels to think when you’re a person who’s maybe done too much thinking..

It’s not just about pain and trauma, but it’s about so many different things…

Digressive factual inserts…

literary textual analysis…

thoughts and discussions around ethics and faith and religious institutions and corruption and deceit and repression…

There are more important ideas discussed in this slim book than many things I’ve read at five times the size…

This is not a light read – as well as its in-depth detail about the realities of an operation and a haemorrhage (although the real gritty detail is pretty front-ended, the emotional/psychological repercussions of the gore (is this an appropriate word to use for a description of a (successful if not flawless?) medical procedure?) is explored much later).

This is serious and engaging throughout, it is honest (-feeling, maybe it’s all lies!), it is direct yet also circuitous, it is discussion and conversation rather than lecture, it is in dialogue with itself as a text, later parts of the book feeling like responses to early parts…

Postscripts to postscripts, maybe…

I loved it.

It is a book that describes and eviscerates a life, lacking in shame or subterfuge, avoiding excuses or denial…

It feels real because there’s never anything, ultimately, salacious or shocking or scandalous, which is arguably what makes it so melancholic, so human, so true…

It’s not the worst choices a person can make, but depictions of the worst choices a particular person made, in response to, and as a result of, genuine trauma.

Lives fall apart all the time.

This life falls apart in a way that doesn’t feel very far away from ways in which I, too, have fallen in the past.

And, I suppose, part of me almost felt relief at how distant this type of collapse feels from me now, despite feeling far from impossible.

I can’t see myself sinking into binges that last months, I can’t see myself falling into YouTube black holes in the middle of the night…

but it could happen!

It might happen!

It happened to Ashworth, someone with far more going for her than I have, far more to lose… Or maybe not.

Maybe we shed the things we need to shed and proceed onwards with the things that remain useful for us to hold onto…

I thought this was a marvellous book.

Spectacular. Unputdownable.

Exactly the kind of thing I want from a text. A human, their thoughts, their ideas, their feelings, their self.

I need to get better again at not reading the mediocre…

Do do do order Notes Made While Falling direct from Goldsmiths Press