Jenn Ashworth talks to Female First about her second novel Cold Light

Ashworth describes the novel as ‘the story of three teenage girls who were best friends in the late 1990s in a town a bit like Preston, Lancashire. When one of the girls dies in what looks like a suicide pact her much older boyfriend the two left behind spend a lifetime unpicking what they thought they knew about her, themselves and their friendship. When a second body is discovered the girls, now grown up realise the truth was more tangled and darker than they’d allowed themselves to believe.

Ashworth’s inspiration came from her desire to write about girls in their teen years, ‘that particular time of life, between childhood and adulthood, had always felt more mysterious and dangerous to me. I was interested in the story making that happen when someone dies- the way they become almost larger than life in their minds of the people left behind, so I wanted to explore that a bit too.’

For all the aspiring authors out there Ashworth’s best bit of advice is ‘to read a lot and edit more than you think you have to.' Her writing process is ‘different for each project, but rarely very linear. I tend to delete a lot and make lots of false starts. I’m not usually a planner. I can write first drafts very quickly, but the unpicking and editing and rewriting might take another two years.'

Ashworth has not stopped writing and is now working on her third novel, ‘a story about an LDS family called the Friday Gospels.’ Writing is something that has been a big part of her life, she realised she wanted to write when she was only little, ‘there is a picture of me with a typewriter at my third birthday party and things have never really been different from that moment onwards.’

As do many other writers Ashworth teaches, ‘my week is divided between writing and teaching and I do a lot of reading too. It’s all very unspectacular office and desk bound work, with the occasional trip out on a train to do an event. The writing life is very unglamorous.’

Ashworth’s previous novel, A Kind of Intimacy has formed the text for the second year of the MA creative writing course at Bolton University. Her inspiration for this arose from where she was staying at the time. ‘I was living in a house next to a pub- feeling little bored and friendless and seeing all these people having a great time right next door to me. I got to wondering what it would be like if everything you ever wanted really was just next door to you and how that would affect a person. The novel sort of grew from there.'

A Kind of Intimacy is a novel that uses the concept of the unreliable narrator, ‘I think all first person narrators are partial or unreliable in some way and as I wrote I started thinking of ways to emphasize that. I’m very interested in the ways we tell and don’t tell our own stories- almost all of my fiction has been first person.’

Ashworth concludes that the best thing about being a writer is ‘being alone with your daydreams most of the time. Making things up. Doing what you always wanted to do and having readers write to me now and again to tell me how my books have affected them.’

Lucy Walton