Busy Being Free: A Lifelong Romantic is Seduced by Solitude

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At times I laughed out loud but I also nearly gave up on the book two or three times because the name dropping and superfluous vocabulary became irritating. I was at the cemetery, admiring the flowers and books at the graves of Karl Marx and Douglas Adams. The thing found most painful about divorce is that there was no Mark spot at which to leave offerings…. Songs are the place to leave offerings by everything you lost and everything that stayed - and they’re the flowers too.” for, or enjoyment of, what one is doing: a diligent student. industrious often implies a habitual characteristic of steady and zealous application, often In the words of revered jazz critic Ira Gitler, she “has it all, and then some … artistic, swinging, and superbly entertaining.”

Barbara Fasano Musician - All About Jazz Barbara Fasano Musician - All About Jazz

She does not attempt to extrapolate universal meanings or turn her hard-won insights into lessons for other women Emma Forrest’s memoir opens with a question from a north London mum who took one look at Forrest’s flat and asked: “How did this happen to you?” Forrest didn’t take offence. “It had come out wrong, but I didn’t hold that against her — my life had come out wrong too.”

Her writing hums with life, honesty and intelligence and underneath the romance and red carpets is loneliness and vulnerability. -- Marianne Power * THE TIMES *

Busy Being Free - PressReader Busy Being Free - PressReader

Forrest is examining, with an unflinching eye and a formidable cultural frame of reference... what it means for a woman to find herself alone in her 40s and to redefine herself outside a context of marriage, motherhood and men... One of Forrest's greatest gifts as a writer - apart from her humour; like its predecessor, Busy Being Free is frequently hilarious - is her instinct for ambiguity. She writes so well about messy lives because she understands the contradictions we are all prone to... the fact that she has written about this mid life excavation with such ferocity and frankness is cause for celebration. -- Stephanie Merritt * THE OBSERVER * I'm busy just now ]; industrious suggests habitual devotion to one's work or activity [an industrious salesclerk ]; diligent implies unremitting attention, usually to a particular task, and connotes enjoyment Busy Being Free is a perfect combination of sharp, moving and funny. A story about marriage and its life beyond divorce, but also about how we define ourselves through our relationships and the physical and emotional transformation that comes with maturity and middle age. This is a brave book as it explores love, lust and female desire to the bone, but does it with such airy effortlessness that it becomes a gift we can all learn from -- Lily Dunn, author of Sins of My Father Seductive and sexy easy-read, also warming and re-affirming - there is romance in solitude. Life lesson that it’s better to be comfortable and alone rather than uncomfortable with another. I loved Emma’s feature on Vogue: Getting Divorced Made Me Reassess My Entire Wardrobe, and why not find out which eight books Emma Forrest would take with her to a desert island? Emma Forrest Author BioThe subject of Joni Mitchell’s 1968 song “Cactus Tree” is a woman who has always had men after her. But she’s not interested in them. “He will find it hard to shake her from his memory,” Mitchell sings, with a hint of melancholy in her voice, “And she’s so busy being free.” I took comfort in many of the things she revealed she processed post divorce and her exploration of shame and disappointment. Karma from NyShe's singing about being free and the guys who want her to settle down with them. She thinks she might love them all but she doesn't want to settle down. She doesn't want to hurt them but hey, would you settle down if you looked like Joni, had her intelligence and talent and was just getting started? I know I wouldn't. But yeah, it must have hurt to have so many wanting a committment from her; kinda selfish on their part in my humble opinion. Nonetheless, I think it made her feel bad...guilty...that they were hurt. She still wanted to see them but she didn't want to see one of them only and be tied down. Good for her. I’ve loved Emma Forrest since her first novel, Namedropper. This is perhaps her strongest book. Her writing has deepened and certain lines grabbed my heart. Still, I didn’t give it 5 stars because the ending seemed rushed to be tidied with a nice bow. And her ex-husband was straight up abusive at points but those behaviors are sort of described as just personality quirks. I don’t know if that’s how it was edited or if Emma has blinders about that. Still, I really loved reading Emma’s honest, messy, beautiful thoughts on motherhood, aging, sex and more.

busy - Cambridge English Thesaurus with synonyms and examples busy - Cambridge English Thesaurus with synonyms and examples

Lauded by everyone from Nigella Lawson to Lisa Taddeo, the title of Busy Being Free is taken from the song Cactus Tree by Joni Mitchell, in which Mitchell sings about an unnamed woman’s need for freedom and resistance to romantic commitment. In every case, the woman “thinks she loves them all” but ultimately is always “too busy being free.” – a notion which ties in beautifully with the melodies of Busy Being Free. Barbara continues to amaze me. She excels in sounding as if the songs were written just for her ... such robust energy, I just had to play the replay button. There should be mention of her co-producer/pianist John di Martino. His piano support is just about the most intelligent and useful any smart and wise singer could have." ~ Dan Singer, In Tune International In one chapter she reflects on her worst sexual experiences, including several from her time as a precociously talented 16-year-old thrust into the adult world of newspaper journalism that would certainly qualify for #MeToo revision. “When I was a teenager, one man who – and I use my words very carefully here – had sex with me is now dead, and I know him to have been a very bad man, despite what the obituaries said.” But she goes on to say: “The interesting part is that I voluntarily kept seeing him for a few weeks.” One of Forrest’s greatest gifts as a writer – apart from her humour; like its predecessor, Busy Being Free is frequently hilarious – is her instinct for ambiguity. She writes so well about messy lives because she understands the contradictions we are all prone to, though I wonder if there is a generational aspect to this; it’s possible that younger women may not be as relaxed about, say, the blurring of professional and sexual relationships that Forrest regards as largely positive. I love words as much as most avid readers. I did an English degree and especially enjoy poetic writing on topics that resonate with me such as this one, but the context in which these words were used (i.e. talking about her husband’s obsession with a Kanye West song or her toyboy being ridiculously cool) just annoyed me. We get it. You can use uncommon, fancy words. You know famous people. It took away from the real life situations she was describing rather than add anything to them and this grated on me at times. Forrest, now 45, had a hugely successful adolescence. A teenage columnist for The Sunday Times, she became a music journalist and published her first novel, Namedropper, aged 22. She went on to write more novels before leaving journalism to work as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Her 2011 memoir Your Voice in My Head detailed her experience with mental illness, suicide attempts and the death of her psychiatrist, and in part examined her relationship with the actor Colin Farrell.

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When you swap a Hollywood marriage and a LA mansion with waterside views, for a little attic flat shared only with your daughter, beneath the star-filled sky of deepest North London? Barbara Fasano is not just a singer, she is a persuasive storyteller. In her warm alto, supported by John di Martino's blissful arrangements and a swinging band, she is committed to telling these stories ... an exceptional ballad singer who can also swing. And sing she does. Borrowing from the tapestry of her life, she imbues truth in her delivery at every turn." ~ John Hoglund, Cabaret Scenes BUSY BEING FREE finds Barbara Fasano in peak form ... an assured singer with a warmly appealing sound who does full justice to the lyrics of the songs that she performs ... exhibits superb taste ... The band is all a singer could want, with each of the players making solid contributions to the whole ... a consistently engaging album by a terrific singer and the cats who surround her."~ Joe Lang, Jersey Jazz Magazine To describe a memoir as solipsistic may seem redundant, but Busy Being Free is solipsistic in the best way: that is to say, Forrest is hyper-aware that she is telling her own story. She does not attempt to extrapolate universal meanings or turn her hard-won insights into lessons for other women in similar situations, as many such books often do. “Getting to middle age has been a process of learning, knowing, believing,” she writes. “Now what? Having finished that painstaking excavation, what do you use the next half of your life for?” I enjoy Emma’s writing a lot but that might be because everything she refers to from city to Sandles are all part of my life’s journey too. So it feels so familiar and cozy eg I started reading the sample and got furious trying to work out how to read the full book. But now.

Barbara Fasano - Barbara Fasano ~ Singer

Steven Suskin of PLAYBILL raves, "The good news today is that we now have another Arlen collection that can be played alongside Harold's. Fasano brings us Arlen treasures both familiar and non ... praise the band, and the singer, and thank them for a bluesy, jazzy, swinging album of Arlen." For a memoir that is meant to show the freedom she gained by being alone, I don’t understand why it was essentially just a list of every single interaction she’s ever had with a man, most of which are romanticised. Especially frustrating is that there’s no growth in this respect- she decides to be celibate for five years, and then needs her ex-husband to draw her out of her obsession with her new boy toy once she’s ready to date again. Plus there’s a weird focus on sex (seeing the moon while you shower turns you on? Hearing a new song or writing new material makes you rip off your pants? Seriously?) which feels a bit forced and over the top. This book is billed as a story of female emancipation, albeit a very straight, white, middle-class one. But for all Forrest’s clichéd yet still enjoyable wisdom – “So many of us think our life is going to go one way and it ends up going somewhere completely different”, she writes in the first chapter – I could not get past the book’s frequent moments of real ghastliness.

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