#NotTheWellcomePrize

When Rebecca asked if I had anything to contribute to the Not The Wellcome Trust blog tour, celebrating health-related books published in 2019 while the official prize is on hiatus, I wasn’t sure. It’s not my usual jam. Luckily between us we remembered to excellent books I’d reviewed that fit the bill – Notes Made While Falling by Jenn Ashworth and The Remarkable Life of the Skin by Monty Lyman. They’re very different and both excellent. I’ve reprinted the two reviews below – and you can see where the blog tour is going next from this banner…

Notes Made While Falling by Jenn Ashworth

Sometimes you read a book so unusual, so defying of genre, that it’s hard to know what to write about it. Something that is experimental with language and format without ever losing its tethering to the ground. All I can say is that Notes Made While Falling (2019) is special, and reading was an extraordinary experience.

Well, that’s not all I can say, because I’m going to keep writing this. Notes Made While Falling is non-fiction, and that’s about as comfortable as I feel putting it into a box – and even that might be too confining. It is memoir and essay and literary criticism and everything in between.

At its starting point, and the point to which it always returns, is a traumatic childbirth. Ashworth started haemorrhaging during a caesarean and was conscious but immobile for part of the operation. She heard her own blood falling onto the floor. This is an image that recurs throughout the book and with which she was clearly obsessed – it haunted her sleepless, alcohol-filled nights; it became all sorts of other images of falling. The first section of this book is a vivid, vicious, vital exploration of her own illness – a dizzying mix of clear-eyed retrospective and blurred lack of self-awareness, somehow coming together into a brilliantly written whole. She uses ‘/’ mid sentence to give two alternative sections of sentences – places where both versions are true at the same time, and a single sentence can’t hold the multiplicity of reality. I think the whole book, but especially this part, is about the fragility of narrative and the inevitability of narrative.

From here, Notes Made While Falling is a wide-ranging journey. Ashworth writes a lot about her upbringing in a strict Mormon church. (My own upbringing in a faith-filled household was nothing but a blessing, and I thought I might be irritated by another memoir that refuses to see any good in people of faith, but her church was certainly not my church, and her life had many more restrictions.) She writes about her confusing, violent father, and the time she spent in care. A lot of this comes in the form of a short story that she once wrote and which she is now elucidating and critiquing. Again, the outlines are blurred. Certainty is always something Ashworth resists, or cannot pin-point.

It’s all so original. A chapter ostensibly on why she doesn’t like King Lear is really about fathers and memories. Elsewhere she takes us from Agatha Christie to Freud to the Bulger trial to Astrid Lingren and every step makes sense, so we only know how strange the journey has been when we get to the end.

Writing about illness naturally makes the Woolf fan think about On Being Ill, and Woolf is certainly in the mix. This section is about her, and shows the sort of fluid, thought-provoking style that Ashworth brings to the book.

It is significant that Woolf foregrounds the difficulties experienced by the woman writer. The wounded woman writer, which of course she was. It is significant because wounded is a tricky thing for any woman to admit to being. Not least because any time a woman utters a sentence about her own experience, she becomes a kind of terrorist and there’s an army out there waiting to strike her down. Some days it feels like writing truthfully about her own life is the most subversive thing a woman can do. But more specifically there is also the sense that in uttering the truth of painful experience she is letting the side down and embracing the straightjacket [sic] and the hysteric’s sickbed a little too easily. That she is first with her body then again with her writing (that is, with her hands) providing hysterical ladies (the story railroads us all towards it conclusion: all they need is a good fucking, even when they’ve already been fucked). More nicely: women writing about illness risk equating womanhood itself with illness.

It’s such a rich passage, and practically every page is as rich. Incidentally, I’ve put ‘[sic]’ in there but I’m very ready to believe that the misspelling ‘straightjacket’ was intentional.

I’ve read a couple of Ashworth’s novels, and was particularly impressed by her most recent, Fell. This feels in some ways like a logical step from that, since Fell was also about illness and uncertainty and all sorts of other things. But this is a different creature, and – excellent novelist though she is – it feels like Ashworth has found her metier with Notes Made While Falling. It was a privilege to read it.

The Remarkable Life of the Skin by Monty Lyman

The number of science books I’ve read can be numbered on my fingers, and number of science books I’ve read that weren’t written by Oliver Sacks is nil. Until now! Full disclosure, Monty Lyman is a friend of mine – and that was why I picked up The Remarkable Life of the Skin. But I’m very glad I did, and would definitely recommend it to anybody who doesn’t have the privilege of being Monty’s friend.

Lyman (let’s keep this review professional) is a doctor in Oxford, and his research has specialised in dermatology. That interest has taken him around the world, and the book reports on interesting cases from most of the planet’s continents – with an especial interest in Tanzania. The real marvel of The Remarkable Life of the Skinis how much content it packs into relatively short space.

It’s obvious from the outset that Lyman is super excited about skin – or the ‘swiss army organ’, as he labels it. He quotes censoriously a surgeon colleague who calls it “the wrapping paper that hides the presents”, and spends a little time in talking about what a fantastic job it does. Not just at keeping the organs in (thanks skin!) but in all manner of other ways relating to its neurology, temperature control, and response to infection, to name but a few.

For those of us who have always rather taken the skin for granted, this might be the ideal book. As I say, my knowledge of science is very, very beginner – and this book is accessible for novice. Indeed, I would imagine any medical doctor might know quite a lot of what is in here already. Me? I knew nothing.

The bit that caught the attention of newspapers was about sunburn. How even one severe sunburn as a child can drastically increase the chance of skin cancer later in life. And how we should all be slathering on protection much more often than we think. Being a doctor, he’s also able to give the reasons for all of this, in a fairly indisputable way.

That may be the headline-grabbing bit, but I was most interested in the areas where Lyman looks at more sociological factors. I was astonished by how many people with acne have attempted suicide – it is not a trivial thing. More light-heartedly, the section on blushing was informative and intriguing. The links between mind and skin are still to be fully explored, but the different possibilities that Lyman raises made me want to learn more. And his experiences as a medic in remote areas of Africa made for interesting and occasionally sobering reading – such as the community where children with albinism have to be schooled in a secure building, to prevent them being killed for superstitious medicine.

Look, yes, I skimmed over some of the more nitty-gritty bits. I’m pretty squeamish and I’m happy to leave my skin mites in peace if they’ll return the favour. But there is a lot in The Remarkable Life of the Skin for even the most squeamish – and Lyman writes extremely well. He treads the line between anecdotal and informational brilliantly. It probably helps that I already know he’s a lovely chap, but I think that does also come across in his writing. He has humanity and empathy alongside knowledge, and that brings the book alive.

I think this will solve a lot of “what should we get Dad for Christmas?” quandaries, but I also think it’ll appeal to people who don’t imagine they’d want to pick up a book about the skin. Like me, for example!