‘I


cannot emphasise enough how out of character it was for me to do this walk. I’m not an outdoorsy person; I tend to spend quite a lot of time in bed reading and typing


and eating crisps.” Speaking via video call from her office at


Lancaster University where she is professor of writing, Jenn Ashworth is talking about her forthcoming book, The Parallel Path: Love, Grit and Walking the North. It charts her solo journey on foot from west to east via Alfred Wainwright’s celebrated 190-mile Coast to Coast Path – his “determined beeline slicing its way through the entire North of England”, as she dubs it. She is guided along the way not only by


Wainwright’s somewhat cantankerous directions but also bolstering daily letters from her friend Clive, facing an epic parallel journey of his own as he learns to live with a cancer diagnosis. However, this enthralling, multi-layered


blend of memoir and travelogue is much more than the story of Ashworth’s walk through the landscapes of the Lake District, the Pennines, the Yorkshire Dales and the North York Moors, though those are beautifully evoked. It also describes a journey inwards as Ashworth reflects, often with dark humour, on life, death, grief, motherhood, friendship, what it means to care for someone, and be cared for in turn; the limitations of one body and a single lifespan.


partner works in the NHS so he was on the frontline and meanwhile I was in charge at home, which is not our normal set up at all. So home had turned into a place I desperately needed to leave. And then, when the world opened up again, I still felt as if I couldn’t wait to get away.”


A


I dread to think what my recovery from my brain tumour would have been like if I hadn’t done the walk. As it was, I felt ready to let other people look after me, let them love me, in a way


It feels reductive to refer to The Parallel Path


as a lockdown book, but Ashworth’s pandemic experiences certainly provided the spur to do something so out of character. “Back then, my house had become my workplace and my kids’ school and so was no longer my sanctuary. My


shworth is quick to acknowledge that she had a lucky lockdown. “I didn’t lose my job, my kids didn’t get sick. And it was much harder for my partner, who was


often quite traumatised by his work. But even so, it was a plunge into 1950s house- wifery, with distressed teenage children, while working full-time with a whole other set of young people – my students – who also really needed me. My own self kind of vanished.” Ashworth’s yearning to get away and have


time alone also stemmed from a kind of midlife “Shirley Valentine” moment. “I was about to be 40, and my daughter was turning 18 and soon off to university. It’s such an amazing age; the students I work with are that age too and blossoming as they figure out who they are and who they want to be. And I thought: ‘I want a bit of that too.’” As she records in the opening chapter of the


book: “The possibility of stepping out of char- acter for a time and of being someone other than myself became as tempting as truancy.” Ashworth is a writer hitherto best known for


her novels – her 2009 debut, A Kind of Intimacy, won a Betty Trask Award and in 2011 she was named one of the 12 Best British Novelists by BBC’s The Culture Show. So I am keen to ask about the creative non-fiction challenge of turning an essentially linear journey into the blended multi-layered narrative it has become. She laughs. “I’d love to be the sort of fiction


writer who can map their work out in a Wainwrightian way so they know what the end is going to be. But I’m not – I usually just have to set off and hope for the best. With this book however, the structure of the walk gave me a really tight scaffold to hold everything else I was thinking about.” While Ashworth’s walk is an epic journey


away from home, The Parallel Path is also rooted firmly in the place where she lives. “One


A Kind of Intimacy Arcadia, £9.99, 9781906413064


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Winner of a Betty Trask Award. “Evokes a damaged mind with the empathy and confidence of Ruth Rendell,” said the Times. “Extremely intense and powerfully intriguing,” said the Guardian.


6,361 TCM copies sold


The Friday Gospels Sceptre, £9.99, 9781444707748


“A serious, distinctive and eminently readable story of faith and family; about the demands of the world and the desires of the individual,” said the Independent on Sunday.


2,231 TCM copies sold


of the book’s ironies is that after six or seven hours of hard walking, I was still only half an hour’s drive away from home. When I got to Grasmere I was so tempted to get a taxi back for a hot tea. And yet there was something about viewing really familiar places – I can see the Lakeland Fells from my bedroom window – in a new way.” Mindful of the book’s subtitle – “Love, Grit


and Walking the North” – I ask Lancashire native Ashworth whether the walk illum- inated what it means to be a “northerner”. “I hadn’t realised how deeply I had ingested our northern messages around grit. To show care in the north is a thing often done through humour and practical action, and there’s still a bit of shame around the softer aspects that word implies. “But then on the walk I started thinking:


‘What is your problem, Jenn? Whenever some- one tries to help you, you get quite bristly – what’s going on here?’ It made me think about what care might look like when combined with toughness, with resilience, with stoicism.” We discuss the idea of pilgrimage, a word


Ashworth herself uses to describe her walk. “There are two ways of thinking about pilgrim- age. The first is that you embark on one to ask for something; traditionally to get better from sickness. I did set out on my walk hoping to feel better at the end of it. But what actually happened is that I got really ill.” Perhaps this story’s greatest irony is that


during her walk Ashworth began experiencing symptoms that later led to a diagnosis of a brain tumour. Happily, after surgery in summer 2023 and a long period of convalescence, she has recovered well, although she now has permanent hearing loss as a consequence. And the second way of thinking about


pilgrimage? “That you show up wanting it to change you in some way. And it did, it changed me quite profoundly. I dread to think what my recovery from my brain tumour would have been like if I hadn’t done the walk. As it was, I felt ready to let other people look after me, let them love me, in a way. “I didn’t realise how terrible I had always


been at that until the conversations I had with Clive while we were on parallel paths; together but not touching. And it turned out that I didn’t really want to be alone at all.”


Ghosted: A Love Story Sceptre, £9.99, 9781529336764


“Piercingly human and darkly funny, Ghosted is a tender, beautifully controlled account of expectations knocked off course,” said the Sunday Times.


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07


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