What do you think?
Rate this book
Notes Made while Falling
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.
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.
200 pages, Hardcover
First published October 11, 2019
22 people are currently reading
744 people want to read
About the author
Jenn Ashworth
37 books166 followersJenn Ashworth is an English writer. She was born in 1982 in Preston, Lancashire. She has graduated from Cambridge University and the Manchester Centre for New Writing. In March 2011 she was featured as one of the BBC Culture Show's Best 12 New Novelists. She previously worked as a librarian in a men's prison.
She founded the Preston Writers Network, later renamed as the Central Lancs Writing Hub, and worked as its coordinator until it closed in January 2010. She has also taught creative writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, the University of Central Lancashire and the University of Lancaster.
Her first novel, A Kind of Intimacy, won a Betty Trask Award in 2010. An extract from an earlier novel, lost as a result of a computer theft in 2004, was the winner of the 2003 Quiller-Couch Prize for Creative Writing at Cambridge University.
She founded the Preston Writers Network, later renamed as the Central Lancs Writing Hub, and worked as its coordinator until it closed in January 2010. She has also taught creative writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, the University of Central Lancashire and the University of Lancaster.
Her first novel, A Kind of Intimacy, won a Betty Trask Award in 2010. An extract from an earlier novel, lost as a result of a computer theft in 2004, was the winner of the 2003 Quiller-Couch Prize for Creative Writing at Cambridge University.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
October 2, 2019
Like Anne Boyer’s The Undying and Sinéad Gleeson’s Constellations, this is an incisive memoir-in-essays about the effects of trauma on a woman’s body. All three participate in the last few years’ rising indignation about women not being believed when they say they have been violated or are in pain. Specifically, Ashworth’s story starts with her son’s birth in 2010, a disaster she keeps returning to over the course of seven sinuous personal essays. A routine C-section was followed by hemorrhaging, blood transfusions and anaphylaxis—and that was just on the day of surgery. The effects lasted for years afterwards: haunted by the sound of her blood dripping and the feeling that her organs could fall out of her abdomen at any time, she had vomiting, insomnia and alcoholism, drinking late into the night as she watched gruesome true crime films.
Ashworth toggles between experience, memory, and the transformation of the experience into a written record. She admits that she has lost faith in fiction, either reading or writing it (she is the author of four previous novels). Perhaps this autobiographical project is like an exorcism, something that has to be gotten out of the system: “I must write about myself without the fig leaf of story or expertise or authority.” Her Mormon upbringing in Preston is a major part of her backstory, and along with her childhood indoctrination (“We were loved as the gavage-fed geese are loved”) she remembers brief stays in a children’s home and in the hospital with chicken pox.
The essays experiment with novel forms. For instance, “Ground Zero” counts down from #8, with incomplete final lines in each section, then back up to #8, with each piece from the second set picking up where the first left off. Slashes and cross-outs represent rethinking or alternate interpretations. “Off Topic: On Derailment” encompasses so many topics, from excommunication to Agatha Christie to rollercoasters to Charles Dickens, that you have to read it to believe she can make it all fit together (elsewhere she muses on Chernobyl, magic tricks and hating King Lear).
“How to Begin: The Cut” started as a talk given at Greenbelt 2013, when I was in the audience. I especially loved “A Lecture on Influence,” a coy self-examination through creative writing lessons, and “How to Fall without Landing: Celestial City,” a meditation on the precariousness of the human condition. Her frame of literary reference is wide and surprising. I hope this book gets the attention it deserves, despite its small press publication. It also reminded me of Sight by Jessie Greengrass, The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison, I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell, and In the Days of Rain by Rebecca Stott, and I would recommend it to readers of any of the above.
[My only annoyance with the book was that she frequently refers to her ex as “the man who I live with.” If it couldn’t be “the man with whom I live” (I’m so sad about the death of “whom” in modern life), it could at least just be “the man I live with.”]
Some favorite lines:
“My God-hurt head has a hole in it or needs one; to let the world in, or out – I can’t ever decide.”
“how to write about everything? How to take in the things that don’t belong to you without being poisoned by them? How to make use of the things that live inside, those seedlings you never asked for? How to breathe in? How to breathe out? How to keep on doing that?”
“Some days it feels like writing truthfully about her own life is the most subversive thing a woman can do.”
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
Ashworth toggles between experience, memory, and the transformation of the experience into a written record. She admits that she has lost faith in fiction, either reading or writing it (she is the author of four previous novels). Perhaps this autobiographical project is like an exorcism, something that has to be gotten out of the system: “I must write about myself without the fig leaf of story or expertise or authority.” Her Mormon upbringing in Preston is a major part of her backstory, and along with her childhood indoctrination (“We were loved as the gavage-fed geese are loved”) she remembers brief stays in a children’s home and in the hospital with chicken pox.
The essays experiment with novel forms. For instance, “Ground Zero” counts down from #8, with incomplete final lines in each section, then back up to #8, with each piece from the second set picking up where the first left off. Slashes and cross-outs represent rethinking or alternate interpretations. “Off Topic: On Derailment” encompasses so many topics, from excommunication to Agatha Christie to rollercoasters to Charles Dickens, that you have to read it to believe she can make it all fit together (elsewhere she muses on Chernobyl, magic tricks and hating King Lear).
“How to Begin: The Cut” started as a talk given at Greenbelt 2013, when I was in the audience. I especially loved “A Lecture on Influence,” a coy self-examination through creative writing lessons, and “How to Fall without Landing: Celestial City,” a meditation on the precariousness of the human condition. Her frame of literary reference is wide and surprising. I hope this book gets the attention it deserves, despite its small press publication. It also reminded me of Sight by Jessie Greengrass, The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison, I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell, and In the Days of Rain by Rebecca Stott, and I would recommend it to readers of any of the above.
[My only annoyance with the book was that she frequently refers to her ex as “the man who I live with.” If it couldn’t be “the man with whom I live” (I’m so sad about the death of “whom” in modern life), it could at least just be “the man I live with.”]
Some favorite lines:
“My God-hurt head has a hole in it or needs one; to let the world in, or out – I can’t ever decide.”
“how to write about everything? How to take in the things that don’t belong to you without being poisoned by them? How to make use of the things that live inside, those seedlings you never asked for? How to breathe in? How to breathe out? How to keep on doing that?”
“Some days it feels like writing truthfully about her own life is the most subversive thing a woman can do.”
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
November 9, 2019
Some of this was awesome, and in general it's a thoughtful, intelligent book all about illness. I did find it a bit of a slog to read - there was just a heaviness to it and sometimes I found it difficult to follow or keep awareness .
February 17, 2020
I really wanted to like this unusual, daring project, but halfway through this book I am afraid I will have to let it go. Genre bending, perhaps, but I'm not certain it works on any level. It's odd and disjointed—at times just excellent, but often too fragmented in a way that works against the reader's engagement. My interest in this book was very specific to some writing I'm presently doing and it's just not working for me right now. Maybe later. For now I am putting it aside.
Read
September 13, 2021Interesting, if not slightly dense, essays about writing and trauma.
August 14, 2023
This book is totally unlike anything I have ever read. It has been described as a memoir in essay form. The heart of the book is an experience of medical trauma during childbirth but the book is far more than just a memoir. It encompasses literary and film criticism of other representations of trauma and illness, examining not just what to tell but how to tell it. An extraordinary book from a unique voice. I now want to read everything else Jenn Ashworth has written.
March 27, 2023
I started this over a year ago, and lots of other, easier books got in the way. Over the past few months I've been carting it about all over; this, my notebook and my excessive pencil case. It's been underlined, tabs stuck in. Books mentioned in it have been purchased. I had to focus: it took chew. It deserved time and attention. Deceptive, though - it comes through easy and holds you tighter than you think. Not an easy book, but a good one. I'm not finished with it. 'On paper', I've read all the words in it. It's not done with me though.
September 26, 2020
An interesting memoir slash offloading slash creative writing handbook. As a writer and former healthcare professional I found the book intriguing, but the unreliable qualities of the narrator threw me and made it difficult for me to know what to question and what to believe. On some levels that's fine. It's an attempt to create something inventive and fresh, but I found it frustrating at times.
January 29, 2023
I love the way the book was structured and I love how she talks about structure. She imagines it in various ways, but I like the ‘braided memoir’ description.
I particularly like the way she talks about the ‘design’ of a piece of writing. When her students are having problems with writing she asks then to imagine their project as a 3D object, as architecture, or origami.
I like the notebook quality it has. You feel that the writing is happening as it’s being thought.. It doesn’t feel like you’re following a linear argument. It has that labyrinthine quality of a note-book; erasures, repetitions, cul-de-sacs, digressions.
And yet it reads like a novel. It has an edge-of-your-seat, page-turning quality. For me, it had a similar flavour to a horror novel.
Ashworth creates an atmosphere of foreboding, something terrible will be revealed. The momentum is driven partly by the sense of withheld information that you might get in a suspense novel.
I loved how she expresses anger, anger turned inwards and out. She writes like an injured animal who would hurt you if you got too close.
I’d set this apart from much autofiction I’ve read because her gripe with fiction doesn’t take long, and you feel Ashworth’s heart isn’t completely in it. She manages for a short time to be disparaging about a certain kind of fiction, but it’s obvious she loves stories and making things up. Her disillusionment with the medium is replaced with a gleeful enthusiasm about what ‘literature’ should be.
I particularly like the way she talks about the ‘design’ of a piece of writing. When her students are having problems with writing she asks then to imagine their project as a 3D object, as architecture, or origami.
I like the notebook quality it has. You feel that the writing is happening as it’s being thought.. It doesn’t feel like you’re following a linear argument. It has that labyrinthine quality of a note-book; erasures, repetitions, cul-de-sacs, digressions.
And yet it reads like a novel. It has an edge-of-your-seat, page-turning quality. For me, it had a similar flavour to a horror novel.
Ashworth creates an atmosphere of foreboding, something terrible will be revealed. The momentum is driven partly by the sense of withheld information that you might get in a suspense novel.
I loved how she expresses anger, anger turned inwards and out. She writes like an injured animal who would hurt you if you got too close.
I’d set this apart from much autofiction I’ve read because her gripe with fiction doesn’t take long, and you feel Ashworth’s heart isn’t completely in it. She manages for a short time to be disparaging about a certain kind of fiction, but it’s obvious she loves stories and making things up. Her disillusionment with the medium is replaced with a gleeful enthusiasm about what ‘literature’ should be.
May 3, 2024
A weird, often surreal, haunted and haunting book. I didn't really know what to expect, I just liked the bit of it that was referenced in another book about mysterious illnesses that I ended up abandoning.
It's very tough to categorize, but on the most basic level, the author, a novelist and writing teacher, woke up during emergency surgery after a C-section. This must be one of the most common human ultimate nightmare fears. The lingering aftereffects of it are what is so haunting, leading to insomnia, a late-night fixation on serial killer documentaries, and disturbing
In the course of this she ruminates on writing and storytelling, and literature that has affected her, everything from the women in Dracula to King Lear (which leads to a peek at her disturbing father...) to her Mormon upbringing.
It's a bit short for everything it throws together, and my biggest issue with it is the filminess and unreliability. It's sometimes hard to tell what's fact and fiction, although it's clearly a purposeful obfuscation. It just made understanding a bit difficult but I appreciated how artistically well done this was, even if I didn't always grasp the connections between topics. It's still a really interesting experiment with form and the writing is so well crafted.
It's very tough to categorize, but on the most basic level, the author, a novelist and writing teacher, woke up during emergency surgery after a C-section. This must be one of the most common human ultimate nightmare fears. The lingering aftereffects of it are what is so haunting, leading to insomnia, a late-night fixation on serial killer documentaries, and disturbing
In the course of this she ruminates on writing and storytelling, and literature that has affected her, everything from the women in Dracula to King Lear (which leads to a peek at her disturbing father...) to her Mormon upbringing.
It's a bit short for everything it throws together, and my biggest issue with it is the filminess and unreliability. It's sometimes hard to tell what's fact and fiction, although it's clearly a purposeful obfuscation. It just made understanding a bit difficult but I appreciated how artistically well done this was, even if I didn't always grasp the connections between topics. It's still a really interesting experiment with form and the writing is so well crafted.
March 4, 2021
A powerful , angry and very articulate kind-of memoir started (I think) after the author suffered dramatic and traumatic surgery during and following giving birth, resulting in a post-trauma psychosis. But it's also much more than that as she looks at religion, childhood, reading, writing and more without a hint of self pity. The pace and fury is unrelenting resulting in a riveting, unputdownable, tragic and informative read. It made me furious and terribly sad on her behalf, even as she was teaching me such a lot. Highly recommended.
January 22, 2022
I've tried a few times. I really wanted to like this but each time I start it I give up part way through. I even flicked forward to see if it was better further in. It's disjointed and a slog and sadly I just can't gel with it
May 23, 2024
Raw, depressing, and beautifully written. The fragmented story aligns with the human experience of pain and tugs at your humanity. It's sometimes hard to read because of the sadness and how all over the place it is, but I'd recommend it if you can handle the darkness of it.
April 3, 2020
Wow. Just wow. Wow, wow, wow.
April 30, 2021
Not at all what I expected but absolutely fascinating.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews