What do you think?
Rate this book
Once in a House on Fire: A courageous and ground-breaking memoir about overcoming adversity
With an introduction by Eimear McBride
A devastatingly powerful, moving and uplifting memoir - now a classic of its genre - that inspired others to tell their own true life stories.
When our stepfather staggered home reeking of whisky, ceramic hit the wall. We got used to the smash and the next-day stain, but eventually the wallpaper began to fade . . .
For Andrea Ashworth, home is not a place of comfort and solace, but of violence and fear. Her father died when she was five, leaving her close-knit, loving family to battle with poverty, abuse and the long shadow of depression. But from the ashes of 1970s Manchester and the hardships of her coming-of-age in the late 1980s, Andrea finds the courage to rise . . .
Written with eye-opening honesty, rare beauty and intense power, Once in a House on Fire is a ground-breaking memoir, endearing in its humour and compassion, and life-affirming in its portrait of terrible circumstances triumphantly overcome.
365 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1998
77 people are currently reading
1723 people want to read
About the author
Andrea Ashworth
9 books41 followersDr. Ashworth, born in England in 1969, is one of the youngest research Fellows at Oxford University, where she earned her doctorate.
Her choice of nonfiction as her first work was a matter of wanting to deal with her past, and then be able to move on to writing fiction. She is currently working on her first novel. "I wanted to get my memories out because I wanted to pin them down, so that all those ghosts wouldn't go streaking across the novels," she explains.
Her choice of nonfiction as her first work was a matter of wanting to deal with her past, and then be able to move on to writing fiction. She is currently working on her first novel. "I wanted to get my memories out because I wanted to pin them down, so that all those ghosts wouldn't go streaking across the novels," she explains.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 191 reviews
October 16, 2022
This is a beautiful and brutal book. Full of warmth and humour. My upbringing in Manchester wasn't as harsh, but it was at a similar time. It was a time when people had nothing, everyone was poor, and education led them out of poverty . Poor people were generous, they had time for you. Dickens wrote about London in Victorian times, Andrea Ashworth wrote about Manchester in the 70's and 80's. Once in a House on Fire book is a triumph, eloquent, moving and painfully honest.
March 2, 2009
This may sound counterintuitive, but because I want to encourage readership, I’m going to write a bad review of a good book. Or, perhaps, a plain, boring review isn’t all bad. Simple words can be good. Especially if they are words of praise.
Being somewhat of a “memoir connoisseur,” as of late, I have come to instantly categorize most memoirs into particular categories. There is the Wrecked Home Life/Horrific Childhood memoir (think A Child Called It or Angela’s Ashes or even A Long Way Gone). There is the Weird Parents memoir (Running With Scissors or The Glass Castle are good examples). There is the Self Abuse/Comeback memoir (Dirty Jersey, Wasted, Lucky, amongst countless others). And of course there are always just the plain old-fashioned story-memoirs like Cherry. Once you’ve read one within a category, it’s hard—the next time you pick up a memoir that seems to fit that category—not to feel like you’ve already read it. Kind of like eating spaghetti the very next night after you had linguini; you know they’re not the same, but they’re so darned similar!
Once In a House On Fire fits into several of these categories. It tells the story of an unstable childhood; of abusive, codependent parents; of a young girl required to grow up long before she should have; and of her conquest over these hardships. This is the formula of every marketable memoir. Yet somehow Andrea Ashworth tells her particular story is with such impeccable candor, with such insight into character psychology, and without being either overly explanatory or impossibly vague, that it remains unique unto itself. (Of course, I may be partial to the special treat of British dialect, as well. However, the language—no matter the dialect—has to be consistent and convincing to impress me, and Ashworth’s words are both of these things and more!)
August 8, 2021
'Sometimes I got sick of waiting for my own life to start. The walls of our house felt as if they were closing in. It was hard to breathe'
I am not usually one for memoirs but this was fantastic, the account of little Andy told through blazingly brilliant, precocious eyes. A tale of sadness, violence and poverty in Manchester - Andy rises through with her intelligence and clippings of Proust hidden under her sweatshirt, working long shifts at the local pub for little money and coming home to protect her mother from a string of cruel and emotionally manipulative men. A story of family and triumph.
I am not usually one for memoirs but this was fantastic, the account of little Andy told through blazingly brilliant, precocious eyes. A tale of sadness, violence and poverty in Manchester - Andy rises through with her intelligence and clippings of Proust hidden under her sweatshirt, working long shifts at the local pub for little money and coming home to protect her mother from a string of cruel and emotionally manipulative men. A story of family and triumph.
July 7, 2025
“…in the last decade, the need for authors - especially young authors with miserable childhoods – to get something off their chest has grown from a fad to a genre. The current crop of childhood memoirs includes…” Once in a House on Fire”, Andrea Ashworth’s evocation of the modern Dickensian childhood, i.e. TWO mean stepfathers… I notice on the copyright page of Ashworth’s memoir that the Library of Congress classifies her work as ‘bibliotherapy.’ That’s dead on. If a confession chances to be well written, so much the better. But the success of a memoir has little to do with good taste.” – Newsweek, August 10, 1998
Let me start out by saying that I’m not big on dramatic memoirs, particularly those of childhood tragedy. Obviously, I know that it happens but I don’t get some visceral thrill out of reading something and being thankful that it happened to someone else and not me; for me, it feels like literary rubber-necking, but if someone wants, or more important, NEEDS to tell their story, whether to get it off their chest or in the hope that it will serve someone, I have no personal objection. I like this term “bibliotherapy” because it fits perfectly. Who hasn’t needed to tell someone after something horrible happens in their life? Whether to just unload or think it through out loud, it’s nothing unusual, but it has to be an even greater relief to get it all down on paper. (Or as much as possible.)
Andrea Ashworth’s “bibilotherapy” is well-written, is NOT in bad taste (unless extreme violence is something you’d rather avoid) and definitely serves a purpose, not only for her but for any young person going through the same thing. Her father died in a stupid, tragic accident when she was 5 years old, leaving her alone with her mother and a younger sister in Manchester. Eventually, her mother met a man to escape from her loneliness, and even has another daughter with him, and this starts the sequence of events which marked her childhood. (The LEAST of it is that her half-sister is fair-skinned while she and her other sister are not, due to their father being part-Italian, part-Maltese, so their new grandmother along with schoolmates and people on the street refer to them as “Pakis.”) The worst of it is that their stepfather is a violent alcoholic and in his rages savagely beats both their mother and them. (He also makes a couple of attempts at sexual molesting her but she fends him off.) As you can imagine, the police are called in a number of times and the mother always dismisses it as a “misunderstanding.” He moves the family to Vancouver but this doesn’t solve the problem, and he in fact finds a “partner-in-crime.” They flee from Canada but he follows them. Time and again, he’s exiled from the house but the mother, out of loneliness, starts calling him and the cycle begins again. Eventually, he goes too far once too often and he’s banished forever.
Could it get worse? Her mother meets another smooth-talker who lavishes the household with expensive gifts even though he has a menial job. How does he manage this? The mother says he has some activities “on the side.” These eventually make him a “guest of the state” for a while but when he gets out, he slides right back in. His real work as an independent contractor is sporadic and when there are no building jobs, he drinks – and he’s even more violent than the first, nearly killing the family at times when he’s not blowing what money he has on expensive take-out meals and such. Again, the police and again dismissed as misunderstandings. Neighbors intercede, family members provide refuge, but he’s always allowed back. I will not describe the violence, only say that the mother is a typical “enabler” who cries when he’s forced to leave at times, saying she can’t live without a man in the house, she’s too lonely. However, it does reach a point-of-no-return and he presumably never returns.
Where is the positive in all this? Andrea is an excellent student and wins a series of scholarships, not only to better schools but eventually landing in Oxford, going in in her professional career as a distinguished researcher. Margaret Forster in the Sunday Telegraph described it as a war report from the front line which should be issued by inner-city educational authorities to girls at their comprehensives. In a sense, it’s true; we always read stories from those who’ve escaped from private hells but what about those who can’t escape? My hope is that there’s someone that this book will help and maybe they can get out alive instead of being dragged down like so many others.
Let me start out by saying that I’m not big on dramatic memoirs, particularly those of childhood tragedy. Obviously, I know that it happens but I don’t get some visceral thrill out of reading something and being thankful that it happened to someone else and not me; for me, it feels like literary rubber-necking, but if someone wants, or more important, NEEDS to tell their story, whether to get it off their chest or in the hope that it will serve someone, I have no personal objection. I like this term “bibliotherapy” because it fits perfectly. Who hasn’t needed to tell someone after something horrible happens in their life? Whether to just unload or think it through out loud, it’s nothing unusual, but it has to be an even greater relief to get it all down on paper. (Or as much as possible.)
Andrea Ashworth’s “bibilotherapy” is well-written, is NOT in bad taste (unless extreme violence is something you’d rather avoid) and definitely serves a purpose, not only for her but for any young person going through the same thing. Her father died in a stupid, tragic accident when she was 5 years old, leaving her alone with her mother and a younger sister in Manchester. Eventually, her mother met a man to escape from her loneliness, and even has another daughter with him, and this starts the sequence of events which marked her childhood. (The LEAST of it is that her half-sister is fair-skinned while she and her other sister are not, due to their father being part-Italian, part-Maltese, so their new grandmother along with schoolmates and people on the street refer to them as “Pakis.”) The worst of it is that their stepfather is a violent alcoholic and in his rages savagely beats both their mother and them. (He also makes a couple of attempts at sexual molesting her but she fends him off.) As you can imagine, the police are called in a number of times and the mother always dismisses it as a “misunderstanding.” He moves the family to Vancouver but this doesn’t solve the problem, and he in fact finds a “partner-in-crime.” They flee from Canada but he follows them. Time and again, he’s exiled from the house but the mother, out of loneliness, starts calling him and the cycle begins again. Eventually, he goes too far once too often and he’s banished forever.
Could it get worse? Her mother meets another smooth-talker who lavishes the household with expensive gifts even though he has a menial job. How does he manage this? The mother says he has some activities “on the side.” These eventually make him a “guest of the state” for a while but when he gets out, he slides right back in. His real work as an independent contractor is sporadic and when there are no building jobs, he drinks – and he’s even more violent than the first, nearly killing the family at times when he’s not blowing what money he has on expensive take-out meals and such. Again, the police and again dismissed as misunderstandings. Neighbors intercede, family members provide refuge, but he’s always allowed back. I will not describe the violence, only say that the mother is a typical “enabler” who cries when he’s forced to leave at times, saying she can’t live without a man in the house, she’s too lonely. However, it does reach a point-of-no-return and he presumably never returns.
Where is the positive in all this? Andrea is an excellent student and wins a series of scholarships, not only to better schools but eventually landing in Oxford, going in in her professional career as a distinguished researcher. Margaret Forster in the Sunday Telegraph described it as a war report from the front line which should be issued by inner-city educational authorities to girls at their comprehensives. In a sense, it’s true; we always read stories from those who’ve escaped from private hells but what about those who can’t escape? My hope is that there’s someone that this book will help and maybe they can get out alive instead of being dragged down like so many others.
December 17, 2010
This really is a misery memoir; Nigel Slater lived a life of Riley compared to Andrea Ashworth. It's a tough read -- you feel angry with her mother and successive stepfathers for being such inadequate and dangerous parents, but at the same time you have to feel sorry for them. Andrea's mother was clearly incapable of bringing up children on her own, having not grown up emotionally herself. But she was also incapable of choosing the right person to help her, and in the deprived milieu in which she lived in 1970s Manchester, there was little to no help available to her. Again and again she returned to her abusive partners, ignoring the advice of friends and family and putting herself and her children in danger, because she couldn't bear the thought of being alone.
Andrea's tough will to survive and at the same time protect her family and somehow hold it together reminded me of the young Maya Angelou. In the last few chapters, you are on tenterhooks, and it's a relief when Andrea finally sails off into her future. She will survive, but will her mother?
During her school days, part of Andrea's survival technique was writing poetry and this book is rich with allusion, metaphor, and creative use of words, which sets it above many other memoirs of this sort, while evoking the clammy, claustrophobic atmosphere of the various slums the family lived in while 1980s prosperity happened to other people.
Andrea's tough will to survive and at the same time protect her family and somehow hold it together reminded me of the young Maya Angelou. In the last few chapters, you are on tenterhooks, and it's a relief when Andrea finally sails off into her future. She will survive, but will her mother?
During her school days, part of Andrea's survival technique was writing poetry and this book is rich with allusion, metaphor, and creative use of words, which sets it above many other memoirs of this sort, while evoking the clammy, claustrophobic atmosphere of the various slums the family lived in while 1980s prosperity happened to other people.
July 26, 2014
This memoir is essentially an old story about childhood abuse, written from a child's point of view. However, it's a beautifully written poetic book approached with such clarity and maturity, I found it compelling and read it in one day. The tactile descriptions of small moments experienced, gave weight and power to the prose. If anyone needs an exercise in showing and not telling, study this book. In the opening chapter, a seemingly cheerful description of the families situation, became laden with foreboding with a few choice words. Writing to lose yourself to.
Read
November 21, 2025Marking this as finished but I can’t read any more of it. So unrelentingly bleak, so much domestic abuse. For some reason knowing that she has a second stepdad who is similarly abusive (her mum is still with the first stepdad at the point where I put the book aside) has put me off continuing.
Fantastically done and great writing, I just think you need to be made of sterner stuff than I am to read about so much abuse and trauma.
Fantastically done and great writing, I just think you need to be made of sterner stuff than I am to read about so much abuse and trauma.
July 6, 2025
Det var som att jag läste samma 20 sidor om och om igen.
October 27, 2017
Supremely honest and raw; I found myself swept away by Andrea's recollections of a brutal childhood; full of pain and fear, filled with minuscule slivers of hope that clearly kept an exceptional young woman alive. To have to be so subversive, so skilful and so determined to get one wants in life makes you a rock hard person with the softest and most breakable inner parts. It was so very hard to read the words but I couldn't tear myself away, needing to be with Andrea in her excruciating journey; to feel her buildungsroman unfurl and to stand beside her as she finally reached the summit of that beacon of hope. I thank an exceptional woman for having the bravery to tell her tale so translucently and brilliantly. It's poignancy had touched me deeply and it is not something I will easily forget.
June 1, 2014
It is such a weird thing to witness the process of People's lives going to pieces, knowing that it happens every Day in a street nearby somewhere, also knowing that most people are not as gifted, lucky or as strong as this protagonist who lived through it and managed to not flounder and go under. What wrecks people so? Fear of loneliness seems to be the explanation. This reading made me appreciate that I was never that someone living a life of abuse, violence and poverty in a street nearby.
March 19, 2014
This unique book describes the early years of the author. Both heart breaking and lively, this book is a delight and moving, with the people's lives stuck inside me afterwards. I really praise the author for writing this unique telling of hope, love and hurting.
In one word this book is: Powerful. I would recommend this to someone who doesn't mind strong language and true stories from a different perspective.
In one word this book is: Powerful. I would recommend this to someone who doesn't mind strong language and true stories from a different perspective.
November 28, 2008
I remember being really affected by this at the time - an account of a terrible childhood, but then the genre was new and this was fairly unusual. Now every other book is about being an abused child & surviving, and isn't it getting all too boring? However I don't blame this book which has a poetic heart. Some lovely writing.
December 16, 2007
"A poem was a box for your soul. That was the point. It was the place where you could save bits of your self, and shake out your darkest feelings without worrying that people would think you were strange."
March 12, 2008
Autobiography of a girl growing up in 1970's Manchester. For such a depressing story it is really compelling - and being a similar age, alot of the references are very meaningful to me.
February 11, 2010
The only bad thing about this book is the fact that it's non-fiction. This made it hard to read: it's difficult to hold a book with closed fists.
January 30, 2024
Tragic reminder of what can go on behind closed doors and to extend care to everyone, as you don’t know who’s suffering in silence.
January 2, 2023
Messy and horribly volatile confusion of familial love. Tension between a cyclical claustrophobia of (what seemed to be) infinite violence and pain with the limitless, dizzying possibility of escape (or whatever that means .)
And then the end transformed into something spiritual 'where is God when you close the door.' Through the black and white tidy cages of words Ashworth's inner child's voice rises. Uplift- a spiritual boon where 'everything was glorious'. The power she found in education, in words and literature was ✨💥
And then the end transformed into something spiritual 'where is God when you close the door.' Through the black and white tidy cages of words Ashworth's inner child's voice rises. Uplift- a spiritual boon where 'everything was glorious'. The power she found in education, in words and literature was ✨💥
August 27, 2025
Amazing read how have I never heard of this until now? It’s very similar to Educated but English version - although this is much older than Educated. Beautifully written
October 8, 2012
Had first picked up this book with no idea what it was all about; a young girl's life story as she grows up in a household embroiled in domestic violence and abuse. Add to this a vicous cycle of poverty and the taboos and social stigmas attached to DV, and you end up with a heart wrenching read, which easily stirs up anger at the injustices of life and a determination to immediately get out and help anyone in a similar situation. The same book however also points out quite poignantly to the complex issues and difficulties in DV cases. I had been on a work placement at a DV support unit a few months prior to reading the book, and was struck at the parallels between tales I had heard first hand and that which I read here. The psychological trauma experienced by all members involved, the manner in which the same women repeatedly find partners who are violent, the escalating severity of the violenece over years, the helplessness felt by outsiders as well as those directly involved - all struck a chord in the lives of many families.
What I loved most about this book was the matter of fact way in which it was written. A story which could easily have had a lot more intense emotional language was instead beautifully told in a clear, compelling manner. The author had no need to ask for sympathy, and despite the horrifying situations related, by the end of the book the reader is almost made to feel that she would rather not have our sympathy at all; but instead to be inspired by what is after all something very personal to her - her life.
What I loved most about this book was the matter of fact way in which it was written. A story which could easily have had a lot more intense emotional language was instead beautifully told in a clear, compelling manner. The author had no need to ask for sympathy, and despite the horrifying situations related, by the end of the book the reader is almost made to feel that she would rather not have our sympathy at all; but instead to be inspired by what is after all something very personal to her - her life.
July 14, 2021
Beautifully written, heartbreaking. Ashworth is astonishing in her resilience and commitment to her studies, where she also finds refuge from a horrific situation.
April 17, 2025
This is a misery memoir about Andrea and her sisters growing up in a home with abusive and codependent parents. She writes candidly about her stepfathers abuse and being cuffed for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, or sometimes for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I wanted to like this book; I really did. But unfortunately I just could not get into it. It just felt very monotonous: abuse begets apologies and attempts to "do better" for a while until the father's patience wears thin and he feels the need to lash out again and hurt someone all over again. It is a vicious circle that just keeps cycling. This book should be a textbook for someone studying domestic violence, it is that predictable.
I just could not get into this book and kept hoping that someone would break the cycle or that she would escape somehow. I kept waiting for it to get better, like The Glass Castle or Educated, some small moment of redemption which never came. I can only give this book two stars in good faith.
I just could not get into this book and kept hoping that someone would break the cycle or that she would escape somehow. I kept waiting for it to get better, like The Glass Castle or Educated, some small moment of redemption which never came. I can only give this book two stars in good faith.
June 3, 2023
Heartbreaking story of domestic and violence in 1970s and 80s Manchester. Beautifully written and full of poetry. Andrea Ashworth is the same age as me so I enjoyed the same cultural references. But some truly grim and horrifying stories. Ashworth found a way out through University but the ending is not entirely resolved, as life never is, of course.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 28, 2024
9/10
Grim no-holds-barred coming-of-age memoir. Every moment when you think things can't possibly get worse, they somehow do.
Grim no-holds-barred coming-of-age memoir. Every moment when you think things can't possibly get worse, they somehow do.
October 7, 2016
"'It is the ache you feel, when you wish things could be rewound, even though you know it's too late, to make it all turn out differently'"
This is the true story of a girl growing up in Manchester in the 1980's, her childhood ends at the age of five on the very first page. The truth of the narrative is incontestable. The environment of the three sisters trapped in their first house with an abusive stepfather and a mother brought so low by her mental illness that she becomes neglectful herself has no hint of tragedy or allegory about it. It is immersed in its own details, the joy of real ketchup on the baked beans and the brittle edges of cheap tasteless ornaments smashed in fights, these are told with a gravity and a humanity that goes beyond symbolism into true meaning in individuals' lives.
Andrea, the author and narrator, suffers the violence and fear of her stepfather through a blinding devotion to her mother that tugs from the pages. Although the early memories narrated in the first third of the book have a vagueness about them, a one-dimensional emotional aura, this is contrasted starkly with the mental turmoil evident and self-aware in the chapters which deal with the author's teenage years. If some of the soul and independence of the teenage Andrea could have come across in these earlier chapters, she and her sisters might not have seemed such flimsy accessories to their tortured parents.
For me, the book took off when the family emigrated to Canada leaving the children cut off from supportive relatives and friends at the mercy of their stepfather. Shocking violence is routine, clinically described through eyes as impartial as a paramedic's but with the unmistakable vocabulary of a child. Her mother's earth-shattering depression saps the energy, mood, and even basic cleanliness from her leading to long frightening weeks where Andrea has to act as carer for the whole family. Her mood cannot falter. Her mother regains enough courage to flee Canada, helped by the life savings of their devoted grandmother. Adrea and her sisters leave their stepfather behind to live out of suitcases in the attic of a dilapidated council flat. But their mother pines for the man who beats her unconscious and he is always hovering on the edge of their lives. "wondering when we would be bundled into the back of his van and driven off for another bash at the good life"
This is a study in the unassuming impoverished. No government body recognises the level of desperation this family are in, four people crammed in alongside an already deprived couple, replacing food in the local Iceland when their needs exceed their mother's puny wages. Andrea is an entirely undocumented kind of person, those who are pursued by the terror of "looking poor", not seeing the desperation of their own lack out of familiarity. And yet, she's not a charity case. "I tucked my legs under my chin, pressing my thumbs into my eyes sockets to set colours bursting behind the lids" She has independence and even the squalor of her surroundings is incapable of blunting her perceptions and her reflections.
I particularly related to the depictions of the inner-city comprehensive school. The constant draining balance between personal identity and the endless moulds that children have to flit between to avoid being singled out as weak and persecuted. When her mother disappeared for weeks on end with a new man, Andrea loses sight of the former and falls to self-destructive behaviour and truanting, always with the knowledge of her disgust in her own behaviour. Yet even the advent of a second stepfather, a genial petty criminal who turns to domestic violence against mother and children, does not destroy her. This second man disrobes her mother for her, this single figure of all her unquestioning love revealed as a voiceless husk broken by abuse and warped into a suicidal craving for more. One by one remaining friends and family abandon them as any attempt to help their mother out of this abusive relationship are ignored. "Where's God? When we close the door behind you?" The mother becomes a haunting, incalculable creature.
"I devoured the book in a single night, stealing foul pink light from the streetlamp. I gazed into the brave girl's face, looking for bits of myself there" Between nursing her mother back from slashes and burns, somehow Andrea stumbles towards better friends and higher hopes for herself. Nothing can break her academic performance. Despite viciously anti-intellectual sentiments at home and a selfless placating of her mother's needs before her own, her eagerness to learn won't fail. It's like a force in itself that consumes her body through her final years of school education. As if this abstract thing of knowledge and curiosity cannot be beaten or starved or shouted out of her. It just takes over her, an astute human survival-of-the-fittest, and gets her out.
This is the story of a mind, submerged in delinquency but never drowned. A special mind. Tougher than glass and flesh and bone.
This is the true story of a girl growing up in Manchester in the 1980's, her childhood ends at the age of five on the very first page. The truth of the narrative is incontestable. The environment of the three sisters trapped in their first house with an abusive stepfather and a mother brought so low by her mental illness that she becomes neglectful herself has no hint of tragedy or allegory about it. It is immersed in its own details, the joy of real ketchup on the baked beans and the brittle edges of cheap tasteless ornaments smashed in fights, these are told with a gravity and a humanity that goes beyond symbolism into true meaning in individuals' lives.
Andrea, the author and narrator, suffers the violence and fear of her stepfather through a blinding devotion to her mother that tugs from the pages. Although the early memories narrated in the first third of the book have a vagueness about them, a one-dimensional emotional aura, this is contrasted starkly with the mental turmoil evident and self-aware in the chapters which deal with the author's teenage years. If some of the soul and independence of the teenage Andrea could have come across in these earlier chapters, she and her sisters might not have seemed such flimsy accessories to their tortured parents.
For me, the book took off when the family emigrated to Canada leaving the children cut off from supportive relatives and friends at the mercy of their stepfather. Shocking violence is routine, clinically described through eyes as impartial as a paramedic's but with the unmistakable vocabulary of a child. Her mother's earth-shattering depression saps the energy, mood, and even basic cleanliness from her leading to long frightening weeks where Andrea has to act as carer for the whole family. Her mood cannot falter. Her mother regains enough courage to flee Canada, helped by the life savings of their devoted grandmother. Adrea and her sisters leave their stepfather behind to live out of suitcases in the attic of a dilapidated council flat. But their mother pines for the man who beats her unconscious and he is always hovering on the edge of their lives. "wondering when we would be bundled into the back of his van and driven off for another bash at the good life"
This is a study in the unassuming impoverished. No government body recognises the level of desperation this family are in, four people crammed in alongside an already deprived couple, replacing food in the local Iceland when their needs exceed their mother's puny wages. Andrea is an entirely undocumented kind of person, those who are pursued by the terror of "looking poor", not seeing the desperation of their own lack out of familiarity. And yet, she's not a charity case. "I tucked my legs under my chin, pressing my thumbs into my eyes sockets to set colours bursting behind the lids" She has independence and even the squalor of her surroundings is incapable of blunting her perceptions and her reflections.
I particularly related to the depictions of the inner-city comprehensive school. The constant draining balance between personal identity and the endless moulds that children have to flit between to avoid being singled out as weak and persecuted. When her mother disappeared for weeks on end with a new man, Andrea loses sight of the former and falls to self-destructive behaviour and truanting, always with the knowledge of her disgust in her own behaviour. Yet even the advent of a second stepfather, a genial petty criminal who turns to domestic violence against mother and children, does not destroy her. This second man disrobes her mother for her, this single figure of all her unquestioning love revealed as a voiceless husk broken by abuse and warped into a suicidal craving for more. One by one remaining friends and family abandon them as any attempt to help their mother out of this abusive relationship are ignored. "Where's God? When we close the door behind you?" The mother becomes a haunting, incalculable creature.
"I devoured the book in a single night, stealing foul pink light from the streetlamp. I gazed into the brave girl's face, looking for bits of myself there" Between nursing her mother back from slashes and burns, somehow Andrea stumbles towards better friends and higher hopes for herself. Nothing can break her academic performance. Despite viciously anti-intellectual sentiments at home and a selfless placating of her mother's needs before her own, her eagerness to learn won't fail. It's like a force in itself that consumes her body through her final years of school education. As if this abstract thing of knowledge and curiosity cannot be beaten or starved or shouted out of her. It just takes over her, an astute human survival-of-the-fittest, and gets her out.
This is the story of a mind, submerged in delinquency but never drowned. A special mind. Tougher than glass and flesh and bone.
Read
January 8, 2024Greedy for Your Hurt (March 2003)
One of the hardest things we can ever admit to ourselves is that the source of our fears of death originates in our parents’ behavior towards us as children. We depend on them so much for love and security that we often resist, even in adulthood, acknowledging the effect that either their own hostility towards us, or their failure to defend us against the hostile wishes of others, had upon us. Though Del Jordan in Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, the narrator of Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles, and Andrea Ashworth in her Once in a House on Fire, all associate death with parental violence or betrayal, they each vary in their ability to acknowledge parental sadism and thus the degree to which they conceal it in their narratives.
As there is nothing we more want to deny than our parents’ hostile impulses towards us (Rheingold 19), it is astonishing and exceedingly rare for Del not only to recognize but to demand we attend to them. After recounting her mother saying that you have to “face things sometime” (52), Del faces up to the fact that many parents want “you” to suffer. When she relates her insight to us she does so fully aware that this is an insight many of us suspect is true but wish to deny. “Yes,” she tells us, after beginning by dispensing her insight carefully, referring to the hostility in “people” rather than isolating it in our parents, this “greed for your hurt” is “in parents too; in parents particularly” (52). But what Del does not so overtly relate to us is the effect this sadism had upon her. Given that she sandwiches this insight between her recollection of how she tried to “desecrate” (49) a dead cow and her desperate but successful struggle to resist seeing her Uncle Craig’s corpse, we intuit that it made her think not only of death, but of the horrifying potential to find oneself powerless in presence of death.
It is when she reflects on her father’s attitude when he decided to shoot their dog Major that the pairing of parents with powerlessness, betrayal, and death insinuates within her own family circle sufficiently for it to become personally relevant enough to startle her. Just as she was able to acknowledge that parents want their children to suffer, she emphasizes that they “want” (126; emphasis in original) others to die. But with this powerful insight, rather than keeping us tightly focused on the source of her inspiration, she lets the fact that it was her father’s “reasonable, blasphemous face” (126) that enabled her insight to lose its distinct importance. While her mother’s hostility was loosely concealed within the general category of parents, her father’s
desire for death comes close to merging completely with that shared by “adults, managers and executioners” (126).
Del’s relative evasiveness here is likely the product of a fear that, put in a position where others want her to suffer a stern punishment, her father might not be relied upon to defend her. Her Aunt Agnes had told her previously that she was a “mad dog” (61) who ought to be punished. Del felt that biting Mary Agnes—the cause of her Aunt’s anger—would draw upon her all the hatred of everyone at the funeral, and though she hoped that biting her would put her “where no punishment would ever” (61) reach her, she depended upon her parents to defend her against the sum of hostility directed at her. Her mother immediately did defend her reluctance to participate in a “barbaric” (62) ritual, but given that Del had previously discussed her mother’s betrayal— her mother’s own desire “for her hurt”—she needed to know that her father could be depended upon for support and defence. She therefore understandably understands her father’s intention to shoot Major for his mad-dog behavior as evidence that he may not be the pillar of support she would prefer and well needs him to be. Her dreams of her “kind, [. . .] calm, [. . .] reasonable” father “cutting off [her] [. . .] head” (125), her fears that he may not be counted on, inspire her to temporarily look elsewhere—to God—for support.
However, Del’s father’s reaction to Major’s behavior is unusual enough for Del to think it “blasphemous” (126). And Del’s mother, while she is simultaneously continuing her own private war against Death we see such strong signs of elsewhere in the text (e.g., in her explanation of what Death is [42]), is strong in her daughter’s moment of need. If Del hadn’t had parents upon whom she could, for the most part, rely upon for protection—or who were the sort of people she most needed protection from—she would likely have written a novel that betrays the same need to deny one’s vulnerability to death we encounter in Les Enfants Terribles. Del demonstrates strength, not weakness, when she tells us of her desire to desecrate a dead cow in an attempt to master death. She is able to acknowledge how greatly aware and affected by death she was as a child. Weakness, instead, lies in trying to persuade yourself—as the narrator of Les Enfants Terribles does—that children are simply “unable to imagine death” (18). What this narrator shows us is that, while adulthood might normally bring a broader understanding of death, with children who have experienced extreme parental abuse, “adulthood” mainly means a “maturing” of such early-learned survival skills like self-deception.
While the narrator claims he tells us the story of two children, it is more likely, given the way in which he describes Elisabeth and the way she relates to Paul, that he tells the story of an extremely immature mother’s (probably his own) possessive relationship over her son. Very immature mothers, mothers who were so unloved and unattended to in life they require their children to supply their unmet needs, interpret their children’s individuation as their rejecting them (DeMause 151). Their mothers’ anger over this perceived spurning often leads children to fear that, unless they somehow stop growing, they will suffer catastrophe, even death, as punishment (Rheingold 137). They fear, in short, that they would suffer what Paul suffers at the hands of Elisabeth, when she understands not only that “her nursling was a child no longer” (62), but that he wants to grow up.
While the narrator repeatedly describes Elisabeth as mother-like (we are told, for instance, that she speaks “in the manner of a maternal” [52]; we are even told that her own mother “still lived on within her” [69]), it is when she is described as an old woman that we should begin to suspect that Elisabeth is a representation of the narrator’s own mother. The horrifying characterization of Elisabeth as “a madwoman [who] hunche[s] over a dead child” (67), captures, with its characterization of her as mad, and with its link to a child’s death, exactly the experience of a child who fears s/he will be destroyed by his/her angry mother.
So, too, does pretty much the entirety of part two, as it chronicles Elisabeth’s relationship to Paul when, as a consequence of his trying to individuate, Elisabeth “fear[s] that Paul had turned against her and was deliberately avoiding her” (107). While true that she is described as tenderly mothering him (she, for example, “drie[s] his tears, kisse[s] him, [and] tuck[s] him up” [119]), and as directing her “killer instincts” (119) onto others, she ultimately plans to use her “two weapons—death and oblivion” (148)—to destroy them both. Death is means for her to possess Paul forever, while life, growth, continuously opposes her plans. And while it is Dargelos’s poison which eventually slays him, given the number of times Elisabeth is referred to as a poisonous spider in part two, we may have trouble not somehow believing that mad-“mother” Elisabeth is really the one responsible for the death of her “child,” Paul.
But if those who experience extreme parental sadism tend to displace its origin onto others, then what explains Andrea’s Ashworth’s capacity to so frankly portray her step-father’s own killer instincts? Assuming that the narrator of Les Enfants Terribles was once in Paul’s position, and assuming that Elisabeth represents Paul’s mother, one accounting for her strength may lie in Andrea’s differing from Paul in having had another parent upon whom she could count on for support. However, the marked binary that Andrea sets up, with her mother as hero and her step-father as villain, may reflect the same need to displace hostility away from a parent that the narrator of Les Enfants Terrible demonstrates.
Early in her account, Andrea’s mother and stepfather are polar opposites: Peter is brutal, a villain, while her mother is kind, a helpful guardian. Peter pounds upon his family with “his hairy fist[s]” (18), brutally beating up both Andrea and her mother. He is a savage bully, an “ogre,” whose close resemblance would be found amongst the villainry in the book of fairy-tales he rips up. And Andrea’s mother is described as the sort of person who trips-up ogres’ intentions to mash up their prey. Just as Del was expected to look at her uncle’s corpse, Andrea is told by a guide to look at a “nasty ogre” (27), hidden in the cave’s shadows. And while Del’s mother was agitated and combative, Andrea’s mother soothes her child by tenderly squeezing her hand, and asking her, “Well, who wants to see an ogre?” (27). Andrea knows her mother would help defend her against ogres, and she does, telling Peter, ‘Not in front of the girls!,’” while her “head whipped back like a doll’s” (49) from being hit by him; and also later when she directs the knife-wielding Peter’s attention onto herself, telling him, “[t]his isn’t about the girls” (66).
But while Andrea’s mother defiantly declares that Peter would “not lay a finger on them [her children]” (11), given that her stepfather had beaten her up the night before, Andrea also knows that her mother had not been able to prevent Peter from doing so. Knowing how much this truth would overwhelm her mother, Andrea protects her by not telling her about the abuse. She may, however, with her reluctance to explore why her mother frequently allows back into the home partners who beat up her children, also here be protecting herself from seriously engaging the likelihood that her mother not only at some level knows about the abuse but actually encourages it. She certainly shows us instances where her mother—shown to behave so differently than she did previously with Peter—aligns herself with Terry and betrays her children’s need for support. She tells us her sisters believed her mother had “betrayed” (228) them, but Andrea, speaking with more textual authority than her younger sisters are permitted, establishes them as simply in error about this.
But while Andrea likely displaces and rationalizes her mother’s hostility, there are signs in her text that show she suspects her mother is indeed “greedy for her hurt.” For instance, the importance of Andrea’s schooling as her means of escaping an oppressive, dangerous—potentially even deadly—home life, is made clear in the text.
And Andrea chooses to place her mother’s decision to move to Manchester—where there are no grammar schools—just one page after she informs us of her admittance to Lancashire Grammar (99-100). The dangers that await one in poor neighborhoods are overtly presented in the text too, and, just one page after describing an incident where a man tried to stab her, Andrea tells us of her mother’s decision to move where a “poor lass got dragged down [. . .] and raped” (153). However, there is always enough wiggle-room provided in her text that if we (and/or she) would prefer to understand her mother’s motives as essentially benign, we are able to do so without too much difficulty.
Andrea’s mother is, by the end of Andrea’s account, a more ambiguous figure than she was at the beginning, but she is no ogre. If Andrea’s mother retains some of the heroic status at the end of the account she had at the beginning, doubtless this is because, despite her periods of withdrawal during Andrea’s adolescence, she often was, or at least clearly wanted to be, available to help her. However, it is also likely that Andrea needed to have someone who could defend her against all the perils associated with living in a “house on fire,” and to some extent created this person in her narrative. The narrator of Les Enfants Terribles may do the same thing when, despite the frequent comparisons made between Elisabeth and monstrous things, he also likens her to “a captain on a bridge” (69), and to “a merciful judge” (114)—that is, to an enfranchised individual who might help rather than destroy him. If we allow ourselves to imagine, to remember how terrifying our own parents’ sadism was to us as children, indeed, how it made us feel as if they wanted us dead, we can better appreciate just how brave their attempts to explore it, to face it, are. As for Del, who looks to God but can stare Death right in the face, she is the sort of hero we all might want to look to for support.
Works Cited
Ashworth, Andrea. Once in a House on Fire. London: Picador, 1998. Print.
Cocteau, Jean. Les Enfants Terribles. Trans. Rosamond Lehmann. Toronto: Penguin, 1961. Print.
DeMause, Lloyd. The Emotional Life of Nations. New York: Institute for Psychohistory, 2002. Print.
Munro, Alice. Lives of Girls and Women. Toronto: Penguin, 1996. Print.
Rheingold, Joseph. The Mother , Anxiety, and Death: The Catastrophic Death Complex.
London: Little, Brown, 1967. Print.
One of the hardest things we can ever admit to ourselves is that the source of our fears of death originates in our parents’ behavior towards us as children. We depend on them so much for love and security that we often resist, even in adulthood, acknowledging the effect that either their own hostility towards us, or their failure to defend us against the hostile wishes of others, had upon us. Though Del Jordan in Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, the narrator of Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles, and Andrea Ashworth in her Once in a House on Fire, all associate death with parental violence or betrayal, they each vary in their ability to acknowledge parental sadism and thus the degree to which they conceal it in their narratives.
As there is nothing we more want to deny than our parents’ hostile impulses towards us (Rheingold 19), it is astonishing and exceedingly rare for Del not only to recognize but to demand we attend to them. After recounting her mother saying that you have to “face things sometime” (52), Del faces up to the fact that many parents want “you” to suffer. When she relates her insight to us she does so fully aware that this is an insight many of us suspect is true but wish to deny. “Yes,” she tells us, after beginning by dispensing her insight carefully, referring to the hostility in “people” rather than isolating it in our parents, this “greed for your hurt” is “in parents too; in parents particularly” (52). But what Del does not so overtly relate to us is the effect this sadism had upon her. Given that she sandwiches this insight between her recollection of how she tried to “desecrate” (49) a dead cow and her desperate but successful struggle to resist seeing her Uncle Craig’s corpse, we intuit that it made her think not only of death, but of the horrifying potential to find oneself powerless in presence of death.
It is when she reflects on her father’s attitude when he decided to shoot their dog Major that the pairing of parents with powerlessness, betrayal, and death insinuates within her own family circle sufficiently for it to become personally relevant enough to startle her. Just as she was able to acknowledge that parents want their children to suffer, she emphasizes that they “want” (126; emphasis in original) others to die. But with this powerful insight, rather than keeping us tightly focused on the source of her inspiration, she lets the fact that it was her father’s “reasonable, blasphemous face” (126) that enabled her insight to lose its distinct importance. While her mother’s hostility was loosely concealed within the general category of parents, her father’s
desire for death comes close to merging completely with that shared by “adults, managers and executioners” (126).
Del’s relative evasiveness here is likely the product of a fear that, put in a position where others want her to suffer a stern punishment, her father might not be relied upon to defend her. Her Aunt Agnes had told her previously that she was a “mad dog” (61) who ought to be punished. Del felt that biting Mary Agnes—the cause of her Aunt’s anger—would draw upon her all the hatred of everyone at the funeral, and though she hoped that biting her would put her “where no punishment would ever” (61) reach her, she depended upon her parents to defend her against the sum of hostility directed at her. Her mother immediately did defend her reluctance to participate in a “barbaric” (62) ritual, but given that Del had previously discussed her mother’s betrayal— her mother’s own desire “for her hurt”—she needed to know that her father could be depended upon for support and defence. She therefore understandably understands her father’s intention to shoot Major for his mad-dog behavior as evidence that he may not be the pillar of support she would prefer and well needs him to be. Her dreams of her “kind, [. . .] calm, [. . .] reasonable” father “cutting off [her] [. . .] head” (125), her fears that he may not be counted on, inspire her to temporarily look elsewhere—to God—for support.
However, Del’s father’s reaction to Major’s behavior is unusual enough for Del to think it “blasphemous” (126). And Del’s mother, while she is simultaneously continuing her own private war against Death we see such strong signs of elsewhere in the text (e.g., in her explanation of what Death is [42]), is strong in her daughter’s moment of need. If Del hadn’t had parents upon whom she could, for the most part, rely upon for protection—or who were the sort of people she most needed protection from—she would likely have written a novel that betrays the same need to deny one’s vulnerability to death we encounter in Les Enfants Terribles. Del demonstrates strength, not weakness, when she tells us of her desire to desecrate a dead cow in an attempt to master death. She is able to acknowledge how greatly aware and affected by death she was as a child. Weakness, instead, lies in trying to persuade yourself—as the narrator of Les Enfants Terribles does—that children are simply “unable to imagine death” (18). What this narrator shows us is that, while adulthood might normally bring a broader understanding of death, with children who have experienced extreme parental abuse, “adulthood” mainly means a “maturing” of such early-learned survival skills like self-deception.
While the narrator claims he tells us the story of two children, it is more likely, given the way in which he describes Elisabeth and the way she relates to Paul, that he tells the story of an extremely immature mother’s (probably his own) possessive relationship over her son. Very immature mothers, mothers who were so unloved and unattended to in life they require their children to supply their unmet needs, interpret their children’s individuation as their rejecting them (DeMause 151). Their mothers’ anger over this perceived spurning often leads children to fear that, unless they somehow stop growing, they will suffer catastrophe, even death, as punishment (Rheingold 137). They fear, in short, that they would suffer what Paul suffers at the hands of Elisabeth, when she understands not only that “her nursling was a child no longer” (62), but that he wants to grow up.
While the narrator repeatedly describes Elisabeth as mother-like (we are told, for instance, that she speaks “in the manner of a maternal” [52]; we are even told that her own mother “still lived on within her” [69]), it is when she is described as an old woman that we should begin to suspect that Elisabeth is a representation of the narrator’s own mother. The horrifying characterization of Elisabeth as “a madwoman [who] hunche[s] over a dead child” (67), captures, with its characterization of her as mad, and with its link to a child’s death, exactly the experience of a child who fears s/he will be destroyed by his/her angry mother.
So, too, does pretty much the entirety of part two, as it chronicles Elisabeth’s relationship to Paul when, as a consequence of his trying to individuate, Elisabeth “fear[s] that Paul had turned against her and was deliberately avoiding her” (107). While true that she is described as tenderly mothering him (she, for example, “drie[s] his tears, kisse[s] him, [and] tuck[s] him up” [119]), and as directing her “killer instincts” (119) onto others, she ultimately plans to use her “two weapons—death and oblivion” (148)—to destroy them both. Death is means for her to possess Paul forever, while life, growth, continuously opposes her plans. And while it is Dargelos’s poison which eventually slays him, given the number of times Elisabeth is referred to as a poisonous spider in part two, we may have trouble not somehow believing that mad-“mother” Elisabeth is really the one responsible for the death of her “child,” Paul.
But if those who experience extreme parental sadism tend to displace its origin onto others, then what explains Andrea’s Ashworth’s capacity to so frankly portray her step-father’s own killer instincts? Assuming that the narrator of Les Enfants Terribles was once in Paul’s position, and assuming that Elisabeth represents Paul’s mother, one accounting for her strength may lie in Andrea’s differing from Paul in having had another parent upon whom she could count on for support. However, the marked binary that Andrea sets up, with her mother as hero and her step-father as villain, may reflect the same need to displace hostility away from a parent that the narrator of Les Enfants Terrible demonstrates.
Early in her account, Andrea’s mother and stepfather are polar opposites: Peter is brutal, a villain, while her mother is kind, a helpful guardian. Peter pounds upon his family with “his hairy fist[s]” (18), brutally beating up both Andrea and her mother. He is a savage bully, an “ogre,” whose close resemblance would be found amongst the villainry in the book of fairy-tales he rips up. And Andrea’s mother is described as the sort of person who trips-up ogres’ intentions to mash up their prey. Just as Del was expected to look at her uncle’s corpse, Andrea is told by a guide to look at a “nasty ogre” (27), hidden in the cave’s shadows. And while Del’s mother was agitated and combative, Andrea’s mother soothes her child by tenderly squeezing her hand, and asking her, “Well, who wants to see an ogre?” (27). Andrea knows her mother would help defend her against ogres, and she does, telling Peter, ‘Not in front of the girls!,’” while her “head whipped back like a doll’s” (49) from being hit by him; and also later when she directs the knife-wielding Peter’s attention onto herself, telling him, “[t]his isn’t about the girls” (66).
But while Andrea’s mother defiantly declares that Peter would “not lay a finger on them [her children]” (11), given that her stepfather had beaten her up the night before, Andrea also knows that her mother had not been able to prevent Peter from doing so. Knowing how much this truth would overwhelm her mother, Andrea protects her by not telling her about the abuse. She may, however, with her reluctance to explore why her mother frequently allows back into the home partners who beat up her children, also here be protecting herself from seriously engaging the likelihood that her mother not only at some level knows about the abuse but actually encourages it. She certainly shows us instances where her mother—shown to behave so differently than she did previously with Peter—aligns herself with Terry and betrays her children’s need for support. She tells us her sisters believed her mother had “betrayed” (228) them, but Andrea, speaking with more textual authority than her younger sisters are permitted, establishes them as simply in error about this.
But while Andrea likely displaces and rationalizes her mother’s hostility, there are signs in her text that show she suspects her mother is indeed “greedy for her hurt.” For instance, the importance of Andrea’s schooling as her means of escaping an oppressive, dangerous—potentially even deadly—home life, is made clear in the text.
And Andrea chooses to place her mother’s decision to move to Manchester—where there are no grammar schools—just one page after she informs us of her admittance to Lancashire Grammar (99-100). The dangers that await one in poor neighborhoods are overtly presented in the text too, and, just one page after describing an incident where a man tried to stab her, Andrea tells us of her mother’s decision to move where a “poor lass got dragged down [. . .] and raped” (153). However, there is always enough wiggle-room provided in her text that if we (and/or she) would prefer to understand her mother’s motives as essentially benign, we are able to do so without too much difficulty.
Andrea’s mother is, by the end of Andrea’s account, a more ambiguous figure than she was at the beginning, but she is no ogre. If Andrea’s mother retains some of the heroic status at the end of the account she had at the beginning, doubtless this is because, despite her periods of withdrawal during Andrea’s adolescence, she often was, or at least clearly wanted to be, available to help her. However, it is also likely that Andrea needed to have someone who could defend her against all the perils associated with living in a “house on fire,” and to some extent created this person in her narrative. The narrator of Les Enfants Terribles may do the same thing when, despite the frequent comparisons made between Elisabeth and monstrous things, he also likens her to “a captain on a bridge” (69), and to “a merciful judge” (114)—that is, to an enfranchised individual who might help rather than destroy him. If we allow ourselves to imagine, to remember how terrifying our own parents’ sadism was to us as children, indeed, how it made us feel as if they wanted us dead, we can better appreciate just how brave their attempts to explore it, to face it, are. As for Del, who looks to God but can stare Death right in the face, she is the sort of hero we all might want to look to for support.
Works Cited
Ashworth, Andrea. Once in a House on Fire. London: Picador, 1998. Print.
Cocteau, Jean. Les Enfants Terribles. Trans. Rosamond Lehmann. Toronto: Penguin, 1961. Print.
DeMause, Lloyd. The Emotional Life of Nations. New York: Institute for Psychohistory, 2002. Print.
Munro, Alice. Lives of Girls and Women. Toronto: Penguin, 1996. Print.
Rheingold, Joseph. The Mother , Anxiety, and Death: The Catastrophic Death Complex.
London: Little, Brown, 1967. Print.
November 25, 2024
I love when a memoir is carefully crafted in a way that makes it seem like something from the imagination. Inspiring story
April 6, 2025
the way andrea ashworth writes about her childhood and early teenage years, marked by a never ending cycle of abuse, neglect and constant fear had me clutching my chest and holding back tears. her words brought this story so close to my very soul, i was almost afraid to put the book down and let her go. this was horrifyingly beautiful and soul crushing in all the right ways.
June 12, 2025
3 ⭐️ Rating
Raw and unflinching, with moments of real emotional punch. But sometimes it felt like watching pain through a window rather than living it. A powerful read, though it didn’t quite fully grab me.
Raw and unflinching, with moments of real emotional punch. But sometimes it felt like watching pain through a window rather than living it. A powerful read, though it didn’t quite fully grab me.
April 20, 2009
The book is a memoir of Andrea Ashworth as an abused child. I picked the book because I always find biography's interesting. The whole story is about Andrea Ashworth's childhood when her father died, her mom found a new guy. At first the guy turned out to be o.k. but soon he starts getting violent. They moved to Canada so they could find better opportunities and they did, but the abusiveness of their step dad drove Andrea, her sisters, and her mom back to England. Their step dad tries to apologize to the mom but every time she does he starts to get violent again. Then came the point where they never saw him again. Andrea's mom found a new guy and thought that he was going to be different compared to their step father but he wasn't, he was also violent and he was so obsessed with their mom that he starts stalking them.
The central conflict is man vs. man since Andrea had to grow up with an abusive father and soon she learns how to stand up against him. Theme is the authors experience growing up, and how her step fathers affected her life. Her sketchbook could represent her feelings since her dad sometimes didn't like it when she wrote poems so instead she drew pictures. Her step fathers is a motif of her childhood because when she stood up to one of them, that's when she turned independent.
The writing style of the author had a few English accent and some slang, I didn't understand some words at first but the more i read the book the more I learned what it meant. When I read the first pages it was a little interesting but when I got to the middle I kind of got bored and I didn't understand the point of the book anymore. When I was almost at the ending, I started to like the book a lot because after all the things her family has been through she ends up having a great future. I would recommend this book to people who are also interested in biography's or to people who might be going through the same thing as Anderea was.
The central conflict is man vs. man since Andrea had to grow up with an abusive father and soon she learns how to stand up against him. Theme is the authors experience growing up, and how her step fathers affected her life. Her sketchbook could represent her feelings since her dad sometimes didn't like it when she wrote poems so instead she drew pictures. Her step fathers is a motif of her childhood because when she stood up to one of them, that's when she turned independent.
The writing style of the author had a few English accent and some slang, I didn't understand some words at first but the more i read the book the more I learned what it meant. When I read the first pages it was a little interesting but when I got to the middle I kind of got bored and I didn't understand the point of the book anymore. When I was almost at the ending, I started to like the book a lot because after all the things her family has been through she ends up having a great future. I would recommend this book to people who are also interested in biography's or to people who might be going through the same thing as Anderea was.
October 3, 2011
I remember a few years back my mother remarking that there was a whole section of her local Waterstones entitled 'difficult lives' and thinking, hmm, cheerful place this world, I guess I can treat that in much the same way as the 'new age/spirituality' section and pretend it doesn't exist.
And yet I ended up picking up Andrea Ashworth's memoir all the same, largely because Blake Morrison had written a glowing review. And I'm glad I did - a tale of domestic abuse and the grimness of life on the dole in the 1970s and early 80s, Ashworth has a gift for language that helps you see the world through the eyes of her childhood self. And perhaps its because (at least if you read the author bio on the opening page) you know from the beginning that for her at least there is a happy ending but what should be grim reading was to my mind, surprisingly uplifting, and in places, laced with a great comic touch.
And yet I ended up picking up Andrea Ashworth's memoir all the same, largely because Blake Morrison had written a glowing review. And I'm glad I did - a tale of domestic abuse and the grimness of life on the dole in the 1970s and early 80s, Ashworth has a gift for language that helps you see the world through the eyes of her childhood self. And perhaps its because (at least if you read the author bio on the opening page) you know from the beginning that for her at least there is a happy ending but what should be grim reading was to my mind, surprisingly uplifting, and in places, laced with a great comic touch.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 191 reviews