Jenn Ashworth’s Shelf Life
Jenn Ashworth was born in Preston and studied at Cambridge and Manchester. Her novels include A Kind of Intimacy, The Friday Gospels and Fell. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018. In 2019 she published Notes Made While Falling, a memoir told in a series of essays. Her latest novel is Ghosted: A Love Story. She is a Professor of Writing at Lancaster University.
How and where are you?
I am at home in Lancaster — specifically sitting in a patch of sunshine on the sofa with my dog, Brodie. I've been inside a lot this summer due to some surgery I had a few months ago to take a tumour out of my brain. Recovery is slower than I'd like, and I'm veering between being very sleepy and still, and being a bit stir-crazy. I will be fine, but today I'm a bit fed up and would very much like a bag of crisps.
What are you reading right now?
I've not been able to read for a while — my sight isn't brilliant right now, though that will get better, but I'm still having to rest a lot which isn't compatible with the very long days of lying around reading that I imagined that recovering from surgery would involve. Instead of really sinking into some fiction and living in someone else's world for hours or days, I've been reading lots of different bits of non-fiction in short bursts, picking up and dropping books all over the house: there are little stacks of them in all of the places where I sit. I've been rereading Rebecca Solnit on walking, and her Field Guide to Getting Lost — the precision and generosity and authority of her voice is something I admire very much. I read Hunter Thompson's biography of Alfred Wainwright. I read a book by Madeleine Bunting (Labours of Love) about care and the professionalisation of it, and I'm about to re-read a book called Critical Care by a friend of mine (Clive Parkinson), which is about, among other things, what artists might be doing when they make art in health care settings, and what being a witness to grief and the making of art is like. These are all roughly and sort of to do with a book I'm working on now, or should be working on now.
And, of course, watching or listening to, or otherwise consuming?
I haven't read any fiction in a while, but I am listening to Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazalet Chronicles on audible. I could live inside these books: the breadth and scope of what she's up to and the way she's so interested in children and their inner lives, and the little secrets that prop marriages up and hold them together, the secret histories siblings keep from each other — all the detail to do with food and cooking and housekeeping — it all has me gripped. I've also recently discovered that my university login will let me watch the National Theatre live performances, so I've been gobbling them up — Maxine Peak's Hamlet, Christopher Eccleston and Jodie Whittaker in Antigone, Gillian Anderson in A Streetcar Named Desire. It's been like my own personal lockdown.
What did you read as a child?
I read a lot (was told to read a lot) of religious stuff as a child — I was raised Mormon and all of that left its mark — reading was away to do your daily moral improvement, like jogging or taking cod liver oil. There was the Bible, which I still know very well, and the Book of Mormon, and lots of morally improving parables about teenagers being tempted but choosing to do the right thing and have happy endings. In secondary school I became an incurable truant and spent many rainy days in the main city library reading everything I could get my hands on. I was unsupervised and alone a lot: I think I was very anxious and depressed but the parts of it where I was hanging out in the library were brilliant. There was nobody around to tell me that there was supposed to be some kind of difference between Charles Dickens and Point Horror, or that some of the books were for children and some weren't. Books stopped being a slightly unpalatable medicine for my spiritual edification and started to become about privacy and freedom. I worked through all the Point Horrors, then all the Agatha Christies, then went onto Virginia Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic. I read Wuthering Heights and a lot of P D James and tried some Greek Tragedies and Victor Hugo and of course tried to find the mucky bits in Lady Chatterly. I still have a taste for the melodramatic, the gothic, the supernatural. My A Level English teacher introduced me to Ishiguro and the slipperiness of first person narration, and I knew immediately I wanted to try it.
Which books and/or writers have inspired and influenced you, and what have you learnt from them?
I think I've learned something from everything I've read — everything. But what's been really transformational over the last few years is thinking really hard about my teaching practice. I teach memoir and the literary essay and novel writing to students at Lancaster and figuring out ways to be with these writers — to properly understand what is they want to do, and to be totally present with them without getting in the way or letting my voice be louder than theirs — it's taught me so much about what reading is or what I want it to be, what I want to offer to someone who reads my writing, how I want to be with other people more generally. I think it's brought a softness and a gentleness to my work, though I hope I haven't lost my edges either. I know whenever I hear a teacher say they've learned such a lot from their students I always want to throw up a bit — it's such a trite and self congratulatory thing to say — I know, I know it is. And for me it has been absolutely true.
What’s the worst review you’ve ever received?
I think I've been very lucky in my reviews in that I don't remember any of them particularly displeasing me or causing me much in the way of upset. A friend of mine once told me the best definition of a novel was a lengthy amount of prose ‘that has something wrong with it’ so I don't feel fear or hurt at the prospect of having the ‘something wrong’ in my novels paid attention to either. I don't read Amazon or Goodreads reviews so there are probably some stinkers on there, but most of the time my life works a bit better if I persist as far as I can with the belief that what people think of my books (and me) is absolutely none of my business. Having said all that, there was one early review — my second novel, I think it was — that made some swipe about both of my novels being set in Lancashire — something about my talent taking me far, maybe even as far as Blackburn (boom). Is that a dig? It might not have been. I might have been over-touchy about that. It felt like a dig — nothing to do with sensibility or technique, which are fair game for critique, but some arch incredulity at the idea that the North West of England might deserve more than one novel. I'm grateful really because reading that made me wonder what would happen if I went on to set all of my books in the North West of England. Which I did.
Tell us a little about your creative process.
Oh, different for every single book. Ghosted, I wrote in nine weeks and it was a big shriek of joy just streaming out of my hands and onto the keyboard. I loved every minute of working on that book. Notes — the essays — was on the go in the most secret, painful and difficult way for about a decade, between lots of other projects. I was afraid while I was working on The Friday Gospels and had to write it quickly so I wouldn't lose my nerve, wondering what the Mormons would think, if it was too funny, or not fair enough. I wrote that one in two afternoons a week over four months because that's all the childcare I had. Then my son went to the nursery and it took another year to edit it. The second novel — Cold Light — I hand wrote on A4 pads in my car in my lunch hours at work. I was working in a prison and couldn't take a laptop. Fell was technically very difficult — I kept needing to print it out, cut it up, recast some of the scenes into different points of view. I type unless I'm stuck, then when I am stuck, I hand-write. I have a room at home to write in, but I often take to my bed with a tube of pringles and a bag of aniseed balls. Walking helps with the anxiety that gathers — about not being a very good thinker, or reader, or sentence maker. That's always there. I try to do a bit every day, unless I can't, then I don't. I have little voices that tell me that nobody will read it and everyone will laugh at me for daring to try — every day, no matter what I write. Trying to find some gentleness for myself before I start is always essential. Teaching helps with that too — not being someone else's expert, but being in regular community with other writers, talking about what happens when it is hard. It's always hard, but very joyful too. I try not to kid myself into thinking what I do is important, or I'd never dare to do it.
How has your experience of the publishing industry been?
I think I've been really really lucky — I got my agent just after I finished my MA, and the MA was generally a good experience. I've had the same agent all the way through, and stayed with the same editor for all my fiction. There have been times — at literary festivals, or in interviews or whatever — that I get the distinct sense of being treated as exotic, that northernness or working classness is of more interest than the novel. Being edited carefully and well is a gift — that sort of attention and care isn't a given and I've been lucky to have it. My editor retired recently, and that was a kind of grief to me — there's something very precise and private about being edited. You've nowhere to hide. There's no other relationship like that. It isn't painless, but no relationship is. I'm also excited about working with someone new, learning different ways of working, perhaps being seen or read in a slightly different way. I find the publicity side of things very difficult. Really, I wanted to be a writer because I liked sitting in a library thinking about whatever I wanted, reading whatever I wanted, bothering nobody and being bothered by nobody. Not because I wanted to sit on stages with a microphone in my face giving my opinions about things to strangers. I still think that, really. So there are parts of the post-publication industry that I've avoided more and more as I've got older and more confident, hoping that the books will find their way to their readers more or less on their own. When they do, I'm grateful.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
Jenny Diski told me to always remember that my reader is at least as clever as I am. It helped, that, with knowing how to do exposition — what parts of the world or the thoughts of the characters I needed to explain, and which I could leave the reader to figure out. Her advice has grown on me over the years though, helped me see the reader as a friend, someone curious, someone who is on my side, who doesn't need to be genuflected to, or patronised, or feared. I think about that often — that quality of the relationship I want to invite the reader into.
What are you working on right now?
I have a deadline for a nonfiction book about walking, friendship, and care, which I hope to meet, though I've had to take a bit of time out for health reasons, I'll be back to typing again soon. And after that, a novel. I feel it brewing. And yes, it will be set in the North West of England. Imagine that.