Notes Made While Falling

<b>A genre-bending meditation on sickness spirituality creativity and the redemptive powers of writing.</b><p><i>Notes Made While Falling</i> 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. </p><p>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&#151;or might just allow us to keep on living. </p><p>In <i>Notes Made While Falling</i> 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.</p><p></p>