JENN ASHWORTH giggles when I tell her that the posters on the
Tube were saying "The Mormons are coming," (Arts) as we talk about
her new novel, The Friday Gospels. She grew up in the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and the book features
a family awaiting the return of the eldest son, Gary, after a
missionary rite-of-passage in Utah.
For anyone from mainstream Christian denominations, some of the
story will be painfully familiar. For instance, at a youth-group
meeting, Jeannie, the youngest child, is given an iced cup-cake by
Sister Williams. She is asked to hand it to a boy, who licks off
the icing. After this no other boy is interested in it - "Soiled.
Second-hand."
But each of our faiths has its own specific peculiarities, and -
since she is no longer a practising Mormon, having left in her
teens - I cannot resist asking a question she must have been asked
a hundred times: when did she try her first cup of tea?
"I went straight to booze, and many other things. I didn't
branch out on to tea until a year or two later. It was the last
thing. My first ever [alcoholic] drink was a vodka and orange in a
pub called the Fighting Cock, and I didn't like it, but managed to
force it down.
"My first tea was made on a campfire, in the shadow of Pendle
Hill. I think I must have been 17 - maybe a little older. I
remember the boy I was camping with being utterly mystified that
I'd never drunk tea before, and presenting me with a steaming tin
cup, in a very ceremonial way. No lightning bolts in the back of
the neck, but I did feel a little bit different afterwards."
SHE left Mormonism for a number of reasons. "I cannot lie," she
told the Greenbelt Festival last year. "I wanted to do lots of
things I was not allowed to do - and I still quite like doing them;
so I probably wouldn't be allowed back in.
"But as I grew up, it became more: I'm unhappy at the way my
church views gay people, and my integrity stops me giving money to
the organisation that, for example, financially supported
Proposition Eight [a state constitutional amendment in California
that overturned the California Supreme Court's ruling that same-sex
couples have a constitutional right to marry]. Without tithing, you
don't get to go to the the Temple, and without going to the Temple,
you don't get to go to heaven.
"There's a lot that I value very much about my upbringing," she
says (she is now 30 years old). "I miss the music. I miss being
able to sit on a row with my whole family. I'm not sad to have left
it behind, but I do look over my shoulder."
After the publication of her second novel, Cold Light,
Ashworth was featured on the BBC TV programme The Culture
Show as one of the 12 best new novelists in Britain. That book
focused darkly, with a mordant humour, on an unex-plained death,
and the intense relationship between teenagers.
Her first novel, A Kind of Intimacy, used some of the
conventions of chick-lit to create a character study at turns
horrifying and hilarious. But her third, The Friday
Gospels, is the first time that she has tackled Mormonism
directly. It plays out in chapters narrated by each member of a
family, who live in a Lancashire town, over the course of one
eventful day. It should suit a television format pretty well, too -
the book has been picked up for serialisation on ITV.
"I knew that I wanted all the characters to be rooted in a world
that was bound by their Mormonism, and I wanted them to respond to
that world in really different ways. So I limited their context,
their world - but not, I hope, the range of emotions and actions
and thoughts available to them, or their world-view."
THERE is more to this than the "write what you know" school of
thought. As a lecturer in creative writing at the University of
Lancaster, she is on record as saying: "Write what you don't know.
If you already know what you think about a theme, an idea, a set of
characters, then the writing is dead. It's just about communicating
your knowledge to the reader.
"That's not what fiction is for. It is for uncovering, pushing
forward, transforming. Write about what you don't know. Find out
what you know, or think you know, by writing. That would be my
advice."
While the situation and geography are familiar to her, set in
her home county, the account of Mormonism in the book exceeds her
personal experiences.
"I'd decided, before [the characters] arrived, that I'd have a
sceptic, and a pragmatist, and a real believer, and a social
climber, and a young one just finding out that it is all more
complicated than the version of life sold to children usually
is.
"Part of that pre-writing decision was because I wanted to
demonstrate what a range of orthodoxies there are within a
community that is often characterised by conformity. But, after
that, I just tried to let them go, and see what happened. To let
them complicate things, and behave in ways that were unexpected. So
they all have conversions, and little miracles happen."
Gary's trip to Utah fills him with feelings of guilt and failure
- he failed to convert a single soul - yet, as a returning
missionary, he is to be rewarded with a hero's welcome.
For each of the characters, the story uncovers itself in the gap
between their private beliefs and their public expression. The
family is given a glossy exterior shine by the devout mother,
Pauline; but she, like the rest, has her own secrets.
"I did have to deal with my worry about how the book would be
received by the [Latter-Day Saints] Church," she says. "There's a
tendency, within parts of the community, to dismiss the experience
and perspective of Mormons who have left the Church, or Mormons who
have a story to tell that isn't entirely positive, orthodox, and
faith-promoting. I don't think it's too strong to say that those
other voices are silenced."
RESEARCH for The Friday Gospels involved a trip to
Utah, which offered some surprises. "I grew up in a community where
it would have been a bit of a scandal for a woman to wear trousers
to church - where, even now, gay people are excommunicated, and
entry to the Temple is dependent on a regular donation to the
authorities. Men are discouraged from growing beards.
"I went to a 'Mormon Stories' conference, set up by people who
discovered that, while they found great value in their faith and
their heritage, their own perspectives are less valued by the
mainstream Church.
"To meet Mormons who march in Gay Pride rallies - not tolerance,
not acceptance, but pride - that really was surprising, and
inspiring, and it said something important to me about the fact
that even when they're inside institutions that don't ask the best
from them, humans will still find a way to do what they think is
right.
"I tried to give some of this faithful unorthodoxy to Ruth - a
character in the book - to make her into a kind of questioning,
thoughtful, liberal Mormon."
These days, like many of us, Ashworth is subtle about her faith
position - or lack of it. "Some of my characters have fixed
world-views," she says, "and I try to inhabit that as fully as I
can, but writing is one of the ways I nurture my own unknowing.
"I can present a variety of per-spectives with a novel like
this. But the range of perspectives I'm able to inhabit as a writer
is bound by my own circumstances: my language, culture - my
experiences, perhaps. Extending that ability is a windmill I tilt
at."
As for her guiding principles, they are: "To be truthful,
mainly. To please the reader as well as challenging him or her. To
not use my writing to hurt people. I think that's about it. They
are quite lofty-sounding principles, but I am sure I fail at them
often.
"How could anyone be truthful? It seems most of my writing is
about the impossibility of it."
SHE presents a writer's life as mundane, but somehow mystical,
too. "The best part is the typing, alone, for hours and hours, and
then, now and again, reading the pages back, and realising that
you're on the right track.
"There's a slippery space you sometimes get into - I just waft
about the house in my dressing gown, being horribly vague, and
absent- minded, and not really sure which bits of the world are
novel, and which are real life."
Her next book may also focus on faith. "I read Flannery O'Connor
talking about the [American] South being 'Christ-haunted', and the
phrase intrigued me. I can't say this is a book about religious
belief, though it may turn into one, but I am fascinated by what
'healing' and 'haunted' means. So I think that that is what the
book will be about. But I can't really tell, yet."
And the musical The Book of Mormon advertised on the
Tube? "Better than the original," she says, with another
giggle.
The Friday Gospels by Jenn Ashworth is published by Sceptre
at £17.99 (Church Times Bookshop £16.20 - Use code CT344 );
978-1-44-470772-4.
Jenn Ashworth's review of the musical The Book of
Mormon will appear in the June edition of Third Way
magazine.
Fall
Alongide her three novels, Jenn Ashworth has contributed to
a number of short-story anthologies, and is an advocate of 'flash
fiction': very short prose that, unlike a vignette, has all the
classic elements of a story - protagonist, conflict, and
resolution. Here is one of her recent pieces
BACK in the days when things in the garden were still good,
Adam, lying in his bower and contemplating the greenness of the
leaves above him, decided he wanted to give the particular tree he
was reclining under a name. He called for Eve, who was supposed to
be around to help him out with this sort of thing.
When she finally appeared, she was chewing.
"What's that?" he said, and, without quite knowing what hungry
really was, started to feel it. "Give me some."
Eve wiped juice from her chin with the heel of her hand and
frowned.
"Please."
"What?"
"Can I have some, please," she said. "That's how you ask for
things. I'm not your bloody mother."
Adam stared at her. She raised her eyebrows, put a hand on one
hip. It was some kind of fruit. He'd have to think of a name for
that too, he decided.
"Well?" she said.
Adam searched for something inside himself, and didn't find
it.
"You never used to talk with your mouth full," he said.
She threw the fruit at him. He caught it, felt it click against
his palm like it was metal and he was a magnet. And how did he know
about metal, and magnets? Before he could wonder further, Eve
laughed and a leaf fell from the tree, drifted between their feet.
A colour neither of them had seen a leaf be before.
"It's called Fall," Eve said. "Get over it."
For more on Jenn Asworth's writing visit her website http://jennashworth.co.uk, or follow her on
Twitter: @jennashworth.