Busy Being Free: A Lifelong Romantic is Seduced by Solitude

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I've really never read about sex and been so sharply reminded about how much it is tied up with the fundamentals of being a woman. This deep part of ourselves that somehow gets side-lined and subordinated by everything else. This ecstatic voice we so often manage to ignore. I can hear Emma's voice though, and it's woken me up -- Minnie Driver, author of Managing Expectations 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. In photos, I was very slim and there are only stolen glimpses of this Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band T-shirt, which seems appropriate since the man who gave it to me was someone I was having an affair with. He lived in a Californian mansion and I lived in a tiny New York studio where the landlord couldn’t believe my parents didn’t have enough money to co-sign.

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. A heart-rending and acerbic memoir of appetite and abstinence -- Polly Samson, author of A Theatre for DreamersSome 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.

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. 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?” Compelling, mystical, deeply moving, darkly funny. Busy Being Free is a poetic, incisive, uncensored study of female solitude. I adored it. * Dolly Alderton * 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.

She does not attempt to extrapolate universal meanings or turn her hard-won insights into lessons for other women 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. A beautiful, unputdownable memoir about love and heartbreak, sex and celibacy, growing up and starting again. * SHEERLUXE *