Andrea Ashworth

This is a beautiful and brutal book. Full of warmth and humour. My upbringing in Manchester wasn't as harsh, but it was at a similar time. It was a time when people had nothing, everyone was poor, and education led them out of poverty . Poor people were generous, they had time for you. Dickens wrote about London in Victorian times, Andrea Ashworth wrote about Manchester in the 70's and 80's. Once in a House on Fire book is a triumph, eloquent, moving and painfully honest.

I tore through this book like a "house on fire." It's that good. The writing is top notch, but the subject, a childhood spent in and around the housing projects of Manchester, England (with a couple years spent in Canada), rife with abuse and domestic violence is simply wrenching to read. The author's mom could really pick 'em. Ashworth remembers little about her real father, who died suspiciously, drowned in a shallow ditch, which make you wonder if he, like the two violently abusive and show more loutish stepfathers who followed him, was also a drinker. I will guiltily admit that I read Ashworth's account with a kind of horrified fascination. Her childhood was simply so unrelentingly awful that you wonder how she possibly survived. And yet she did. In one particularly telling passage she tells of how she and her two younger sisters were always glad to see the Jehovah's Witnesses come knocking, because it meant her stepfather would behave himself for a time. The three girls guiltily treasured the miniature Bibles the Witnesses left behind and even memorized many chapters and verses "as if we were doing homework for God." They soon tired of this however, as the fights and abuse continued. "Since God never seemed to come up with the goods, we eventually found ourselves concentrating less on prayers and more on high marks at school." And education, as it turned out was Ashworth's salvation, the wings that lifted her out of her hellish life and into the halls of Academe at Oxford. This is not really an uplifting tale, until you recognize that the author and her sisters did finally escape the vicious cycle of their rotten home life and establish productive and successful lives of their own. While not a happy story, Ashworth's skill makes it an absolutely riveting one. Perhaps one of the most vivid accounts of family violence and codependency I have ever encountered. show less

I had put off reading this memoir for many years as I was aware the content would be brutal. Reading this book is more a rollercoaster of emotions. There are good times but in all of those times I was on the edge of my seat waiting for the domestic abuse to begin again. Andrea Ashworth is the eldest daughter of three. Her and her middle sister share the same father, who died when she was young and had Maltese-Italian heritage, giving them both dark skin. Her mother was still young and had a show more couple of relationships, both with violent men. Andrea takes on a protective role both for her sisters and her mother. The family often has very little money. The family house is sold to take them to Canada for a new life but the money soon disappears and they return after a couple of years with little. Now relying on temporary housing, the family occasionally are living all crammed in the spare room of a relative or friend. Andrea proves to be a bright student and she escapes through reading, although this is often seen as threatening by her step-fathers. She tells about buying the cheapest items in KwikSave, wearing second hand clothes, making do and mending things and, apart from the trip to Canada, a claustrophobic life where no one goes far. At school and on the streets there is bullying and racism. One step father is a criminal and she describes prison visiting. Andrea Ashworth tells her story as a child, rather than trying to analyse what is happening and why. The reader is held by the hand through the book so that you can feel Andrea's concern for her mother when she was depressed, understands why Andrea decides to stay at home to care for her mother and miss school and grasps why the family don't even consider saving when they are in the money but enjoy the thrill of spending. What makes the book enjoyable is knowing that Andrea Ashworth gets out and away to Oxford. show less

In her engrossing memoir, Once in a House on Fire, Andrea Ashworth recalls growing up in poverty in a violent English household during the 1970s and 1980s. Ashworth's father drowned when she was just 5. Her mother then married a man who beat her frequently and made life miserable for the whole family. When Ashworth's mother finally got rid of him, she married a small-time criminal who also soon became violent. Throughout her childhood, the author struggled to protect her little sisters from show more their stepfathers and kept the family going when their mother could not function because of her injuries, depressions, and blinding headaches. Ashworth and her family moved around quite a bit, often living in other people's houses, sleeping in cots or on floors. They all suffered from the emotional and economic instability of their situation. Ashworth recalls the sunglasses her mother wore through cloudy dark English winters to conceal her bruised eyes. She also remembers sneaking out of the house one day to run through a rich neighborhood, where she paused occasionally to open the mailboxes of the wealthy and smell their comfort and safety.

Although Ashworth's story is all about loneliness and love gone wrong, the surprising thing is that this book is not always terribly sad-- there are interludes when the children have fun and in those sunny moments it seems probable that all of them, especially Andrea, will survive more or less intact. Ashworth recalls the details of her childhood vividly, in brief scenes. In one of those scenes, two sisters race down a cobbled street at breakneck speed. Each of them has one roller skate on--they are sharing. Ashworth's writing is crisp, her dialogue to the point. This book is reminiscent of Frank Conroy's Stop-Time and Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life, both classic memoirs of adolescence. --Jill Marquis

At 28, Ashworth writes eloquently and passionately about her British (and, for a time, Canadian) childhood with her widowed mother and sisters, who are brutalised by the mother's two husbands. The author triumphs over the abuse, poverty and racial slurs directed at her and her middle sister, Laurie, because of their part-Maltese background, by writing poetry, keeping a journal and reading authors from Shakespeare to Judy Blume and D.H. Lawrence. Despite the violent battles in small, often borrowed rooms, Ashworth holds onto her spirits and excels academically in literature, science and art. As her story ends, she heads off to Oxford. This memoir stands out for its integrity, lack of self-pity, colorful Manchester dialect and realistic dialogue. Perhaps most impressive, however, is the sisters' love for "our mother," who is so fearful of being alone that she returns again and again to abusive men. Ashworth's story rings true, though it's a bit difficult to believe that anyone's memory could call up, word for word, the scores of mundane conversations that this family exchanged in its daily life over a dozen years. With degrees from Oxford and Yale, Ashworth holds a fellowship at Jesus College, Oxford, and is working on a first novel. show less