‘I’m laughing at you reading the book at arm’s length’ – An Interview with Jenn Ashworth

A Kind of Intimacy is the debut novel by a young writer called Jenn Ashworth, who has recently made a list of a dozen writers Waterstones reckon are worth checking out in 2009. The inclusion of Jenn is something we wholeheartedly agree with. A Kind of Intimacy is just a cracking read: sort of Notes on a Scandal by way of Misery seems to be the accepted line (although, it should be added, with something of its very own, some unique, hard to define Jenn Ashworth-ness). We spoke to Jenn to see if all of the acclaim has gone to her head…

Peter Wild (PW): I want to begin this interview by asking for reassurance (because there’s a part of me that wants to know you really didn’t conjure Annie at all, that someone else did it, that you’re just the front person for someone else who is the living embodiment of the portrait of Dorian Gray). Where did Annie come from?!?

Jenn Ashworth (JA): She’s a mixture of the feelings I get when I have to walk into a room full of people and a woman in a bobble hat I saw reading Mills and Boon on the bus every morning when I lived in Oxford. She’s a bit of Annie Wilkes and a bit of Orphan Annie. Some of me, certainly. I dug about into my worst fears during the writing of this book. The rest of it I just made up. I promise…

PW: Hopefully it doesn’t give too much away if we admit that Annie has been a jailbird in her life. Did (or does) your own experience working as a prison librarian have any bearing/influence on your writing?

JA: I finished the book before I started working in the prison – so I think it is probably the other way round. I like slippery, unreliable people – and I find the idea that people can do very, very bad things and still be very likable fascinating. I love library work, and working in a prison seemed a way to combine books, reading, interesting people with interesting stories, and an innate nosiness about wanting to see inside those big buildings with the barbed wire around the windows.

PW: Annie is not someone you’d choose to spend time with in real life (for me, it’s the curious mixture of repression, prurience and sexuality, she’s like a sickly smelling orchid) – and yet you read the book as if your eyes are glued to the page. I wondered what it was like writing her? Did you ever find you had to go off for a long walk around the block to rid yourself of her for a bit?

JA: Not a long walk – but sometimes a hot bath! The idea of being so intimate with a character – the way Annie is so intimate and confiding with her reader, even when she is trying, very hard to keep things to herself – is one of the ways the book explores what it means to be close to other people. I want the reader to experience it, not just read about it. And people do want to rid themselves of Annie. I wanted the reader to feel Annie’s feelings. And of course, the experience of writing Annie is not like the experience of reading her. A lot of the work was very painstaking and careful – taking words in and putting them out. I only got an overwhelming sense of her character when I read over what I’d written – towards the end – and saw her, and knew I was nearly done.

PW: I have never had an experience similar to that of reading the last chapter of A Kind of Intimacy. The closest I can get to it is… Did you ever see that episode of Friends where Rachel was reading The Shining and had to put it in the fridge when it got too frightening? That’s what it was like for me, reading the climax of your book. I had to read a paragraph or – as it progressed – a sentence, in order to make it through… Are you proud of yourself, Miss Ashworth???

JA: I’m laughing at you reading the book at arms’ length now. Did it make it into the fridge?

So far, the reaction to the book has either concentrated on the comic aspect, or the darker aspect. I’m always very, very pleased when people say that they were gripped by it, or scared, or that they laughed. I’m still shocked at the idea of people buying it, to be honest.

I was trying to write literature – to write a book that would be demanding and leave the reader something to think about – but who is to say that books with substance can’t also be gripping and thrilling?

PW: It’s not just Annie, though. There is a rather unsettling tryst towards the end of the book wher Annie meets a man who… well, doesn’t seem entirely right in the head. He says to her (in the midst of the unpleasantness): ‘A boner and a pig in my lookout post.’ I think this is the single most unsettling sentence I’ve ever read (and I can’t even say why). Do you ever find yourself writing and think, Have I gone too far?

JA: I didn’t ever worry about going too far. Books don’t have a responsibility to be moral in any way. The characters, especially the man in that scene, go too far lots and lots of times. But I just wrote it down.

I think that’s the one of the funniest lines in the book. I had to get up from my desk and pace that scene out – act it out almost, to see if it would be possible to enact in such a small bedsit. He was a scary character – but also, I think, a very funny one. I had this conversation with a friend of mine, a novelist who is working on some scripts and screenplays. We talked about why frightening or disturbing things often cross the line into being funny – what tips it over. I think we decided that things start being funny when they stop being true – or when you stop believing in them. Maybe its not possible for me to read that scene and suspend my disbelief, because I know how I stitched it together. Or maybe I just have a terrible, terrible sense of humour. I do like that man though. He isn’t too different to Annie, really.

PW: There is something of the Kathy Bates character from Misery in Annie as well. Given that that is the second Stephen King novel I’ve mentioned in as many questions, is he an influence? Who else can we hold responsible for the terrible nightmares you’ve given me?!?

JA: You’ve had nightmares? Hee hee hee. That’s better than a five star Amazon review. Thank you. And yes, I do like Stephen King – or at least, his earlier work. I have such a wide taste in literature – people are always surprised about that – as if because I love Clarissa and Anna Karenina I’m not also allowed to love Carrie and The Stand. I think Stephen King has a problem with endings, but I can forgive him that because endings are really, really hard to pull off properly. Who else? Kazuo Ishiguro, Ali Smith, Lorrie Moore, Margaret Atwood (Cat’s Eye, especially, is a remarkable, wonderful, amazing book I will never get tired of reading), John Fowles – so many others. I love to read.

PW: You’re one of Waterstones 12 voices to watch in 2009 which is a tremendous accolade for a debut novelist, I think. How have you been coping with all of the plaudits???

JA: It has been strange – after such a long time of writing on my own and just getting on with it, more or less, to suddenly have people asking questions. It is sometimes a bit overwhelming – and takes you into such a different place in your mind that it is hard to come home from a reading or a signing and become that independent, solitary person who needs to sit and finish the second book. It has made me feel very vulnerable. But on the other hand it is only talking to people about books, a book, which is what I do all day for work at the library, and what I like to do almost as much as writing and reading them. So not too much to complain about really!

PW: I heard that you’re well on your way into the next book. Anything you can share with us?

JA: It’s another first person narrator – a girl called Lola, who’s remembering the winter she was fourteen and some mishaps and misunderstandings that lead to a few of her friends becoming, well, dead. I’m well into the editing stages, so I’m hacking bits out of it and changing the order of things, but I can feel that it’s going to be another book that I might find quite funny, and other people will find a little darker…

PW: I’m interested in writing regimens. Given that you have a young bambino, how do you balance the writing with the family time?

JA: Lack of sleep – and not doing much else. I make sure I spend time with my family every evening – we always sit and eat together. I don’t have a television and I hardly ever listen to music. I’m thinking about getting rid of my Internet. I think everyone needs to choose what it is they spend their time on. For me, any time I have left over after family and earning the money I need to pay my rent, goes onto the novel. I have no other hobbies and am utterly ill informed about the world.

PW: Last but not least, have you read anything recently that you’d recommend???

JA: I’ve recently finished Ray Robinson’s Electricity – he and I are doing an event together in Edinburgh this summer, so I got the book, and now I’m even more excited about doing the event. The best line in it has stayed with me – Lily’s mother, who we meet right at the begining of the novel, has a problem with her colostomy bag that ends up with the contents of it backing up into her insides and poisoning her. She ’shat herself to death’ – she isn’t a sympathetic character and I think Ray might have really enjoyed killing her like that. I’ll have to ask him. But yes – that book. I loved it.
A Kind of Intimacy is out now through Arcadia Books
www.jennashworth.blogspot.com
www.prestonwritingnetwork.blogspot.com