Busy Being Free: A Lifelong Romantic is Seduced by Solitude

Product Information

Some things she wrote beautifully about : how we can think our life is going one way and ends up going some where different and how the place you grow up is the source of all shame. Which led me to this affair. To have the man you love, but who won’t commit, have his hands on your breasts under the T-shirt given to you by the man who is pursuing you… It was an elixir for a 25-year-old testing their emotional volume control.

However, Forrest’s misery about her “small top-floor flat” seems trivial when she flaunts the wealth she continues to enjoy, including a custom-made spiral staircase, with a cut-out design to “cast light around the small space”. She goes on to move into another property, renting out the first. References to Balenciaga shoes, Gucci scarves and the numerous celebrities with whom she has brushed shoulders abound – and are always pretentious. I did a really shitty thing, which was wearing it to keep the feeling of him near even when I was with my boyfriend. As I’ve said, I was very in love with my boyfriend, but he had not or could not cede control from the mother of his child. On numerous occasions over a year and a half, I was made to wait in cars because she would not let me meet her kid. They sensed something toxic in me. I guess I thought they might not be wrong. I guess I figured if they considered me toxic, I’d be toxic. The most delicious memoir that kept me in bed all day. I wonder what it is like to live with a mind like Forrest's, which makes such shooting connections between things and sees a great pattern in it all. I think she might be a genius. Eve Babitz didn't die, she just regenerated as Emma Forrest -- Sophie Heawood, author of THE HUNGOVER GAMES She doesn’t offer easy answers; there are none. The choices she makes for herself will no doubt appal some women and inspire others. But the fact that she has written about this midlife excavation with such ferocity and frankness is cause for celebration. In 2011, Emma Forrest published a memoir, Your Voice in My Head, about her experience of mental ill-health. “I became, for a certain audience, the suicidal girl’s suicidal girl,” she writes in the prologue to her follow-up, Busy Being Free. This new book, she is at pains to point out, is in a different register. She is no longer suicidal. In the intervening years she has published novels, written screenplays and directed a movie; still readers who know her only through the first memoir treat her delicately. “Which feels confusing. Can you still be gentle with me if you know my struggles are merely domestic now?”Immediately after her divorce, she recalls, she went on a date with a man who was wearing a T-shirt of “the wrong fabric”, the type that “would not fall into the right-shaped heap on the bedroom floor were he to remove it”, and so of course (of course!) she understands her daughter’s disappointment at a party cake that she believes to be chocolate flavoured, but that is in fact Sachertorte – “a grown-up cake for a grown-up party – not especially sweet, no buttercream inside, just bitter marmalade”. Neither episode illuminates anything about the other. In my old dress, it meant a lot to have my old landlord, Scott Caan, fly to New York to be by my side. Busy Being Free: A Lifelong Romantic is Seduced by Solitude is tipped as “a beautiful, breathtaking, unputdownable memoir about love and heartbreak, sex and celibacy, growing up and starting again”. 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.

It made me laugh when she highly recommended being creative without having to worry about paying the bills. I wish. She moaned about not being able to afford to buy a place in London with a garden. Most people can’t even afford to live there period. But I tried to stay with her frame of reference and could see that coming from a huge Californian house would be a huge adjustment and I accepted her invite into her assimilation and transformation, warts and all. Forrest is a spirited, energetic writer, and this book, made up of short, vignette-like chapters, flits rapidly between time frames and anecdotes. It’s lively text, but can feel frenzied. Her insistence on comparing details in her present life with musings on her previous sexual encounters often jars. 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. It was well written and funny at times, and I liked the introductory chapters, but quite a bit of it seemed like empty good writing, sort of beautiful, and it felt like she was trying to make it profound, but ultimately meaningless. From the author of Your Voice in My Head and Royals comes a beautiful, breath-taking, unputdownable memoir about love and heartbreak, sex and celibacy, growing up and starting again.I will start by saying that this memoir is witty and raw and for the most part feels honestly and beautifully written.

Writer Emma Forrest is switching from Bloomsbury to Weidenfeld & Nicolson with anew memoir, Busy Being Free, billed as "a love letter to being alive or alone". Hitting themes of heartbreak, romance, celibacy and self-discovery, it's a testament to the power of putting yourself first. -- Alicia Lansom * REFINERY 29 *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. Especially for women. Especially as we are deemed, with each passing decade, to be of diminishing value. Because someone who is that crazy, someone who takes beyond their fair share with their broken energy, cannot be the one to tell you you no longer exist.”