Our host Vick Hope is joined by Donna Ashworth.
Donna is a Sunday Times bestselling author and the UK’s bestselling poet. She started her social media accounts in 2018 in a bid to create a ‘safe’ space for women to come together and connect, but her love of all things wordy quickly became the focus, and a past love for poetry was reignited. Over 10 books and nearly 2 million followers later, Donna has made it her daily mission to shower the world with words and bring poetry back into focus.
Donna’s bestselling books include To the Women, Wild Hope, Words to Live By: A Journal, Growing Brave, I Wish I Knew, Love, Loss, Life and an illustrated book of children’s poetry, Words Can Fly.
Listen to the full episode here and read on to discover Donna’s five most influential books by women.
“We studied [The Bell Jar] in English and I owe a huge amount to my English teacher, Mrs Dunlop, because she opened our eyes to so many things that we might not have had growing up in a very normal school, in a very small town, in the middle of Scotland in the countryside. It was a real sort of bubble of an upbringing and I remember when I first met Sylvia Plath. It was the first time I recognised somebody else’s mental health journey that made me think about my own. And I recognised so much in how she felt and thought that I had not been able to put into words until that point. And I didn’t really know anybody else who might have felt that way or spoken about it. It wasn’t a good recognition, it was a chill down my spine recognition because I thought this is problematic to have this tricky mental health, to have this this mindset that takes quite a lot of work, but nonetheless you have to be aware of what you’re dealing with so I think this is one of the first times that I became aware that I might be on quite a a rocky road, but that you’re not alone on it because someone else has experienced it which is the power of books.”
“I didn’t know much about the world and other cultures, we just didn’t have access to it where we grew up, and this book shocked me, opened my eyes and took me down a pathway of looking into other ways, other people’s lives and other things that were going on around the world other than my own little life and my friends and and what we were struggling with. It really affected me, again, not in a hugely positive way at the time. I found it quite hard work. I found it quite upsetting. I found it quite depressing to know that that kind of inequality and pain existed and that people were treated like that and, you know, it hurt my heart. But when you get past that point, your eyes are wide open. You’re far more empathetic, you know, you’re able to go out into the world and and be of better service because of what somebody else has has been clever enough to put down in a book.”
“Bridget Jones summed up that chapter of my life, I’d moved into the city of Manchester, I lived there with my best friend, we were working, we were part of society, we were having a great time. But Bridget Jones just reminded us all again, imperfection is a wonderful thing. You know, it celebrated the ridiculousness of humanity as well: the diary with the weighing yourself and how many cigarettes you’ve smoked and so on and so forth. And all the silly thoughts that we have, even though we’re also having deep thoughts. So I was directly Helen’s audience, you know, when she wrote Bridget Jones and it became a community. We were suddenly in a community. Single women who were just trying to carve out a life suddenly had a community and we were Bridget’s gang and it made us feel joyful about things that might have been a little bit shameful before.”
“Something that could have been another depression for me – had I not had the information, or knew what to expect, or could see amazing women around me leading the way, that could have been another bump in my rocky path. But it wasn’t. And I totally believe that’s because of the conversations opened by Davina and other women. I think I got to avoid that branch on the tree because I’ve kind of sailed through it, not sailed through in a way that I haven’t had the symptoms or the the downsides, but when you have the information, when you have awareness and more importantly permission to not be ashamed of it that changes the way you experience anything so I’ve experienced it with a real dollop of joy.”
“The main character of Etta was a complicated character and so it took a while to get into who she actually was and that was very deliberately and beautifully done by Dawn. So you’re trying to work out why she’s in this place, why she’s decided it’s her last day and you don’t actually find that out until way into the book. As with most women, she was thinking about other people first and she was trying to find a way to make everything easier for everybody else and wasn’t putting herself in any position of importance, which is hugely relatable for all women, I think. We all do that. And we all need that reminder that this is about you too. This is your party. You’re also invited. You don’t have to just make it wonderful for everyone else.”
