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

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. 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".

He’d rented me the Laurel Canyon guest house I’d lived in from 30 to 34, when I first moved to Los Angeles. After my great romantic tragedy of 2010, when he’d heard me sobbing my heart out late into the night, Scott held me as I told him I wished I were dead. He told me that if I felt the same way in a year, he’d personally help me to buy a gun. I didn’t feel remotely the same way in a year. Many years later, I was alive and Scott came to do one scene in my debut movie. 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. I took comfort in many of the things she revealed she processed post divorce and her exploration of shame and disappointment.

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.

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. Compelling, mystical, deeply moving, darkly funny. Busy Being Free is a poetic, incisive, uncensored study of female solitude. I adored it. * Dolly Alderton * 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. 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?” Franklin said: “I have worshipped Emma Forrest from afar for a very long time. She is one of our very best writers. Her first memoir Your Voice in My Head is a cult classic that inspires total passion from all who read it, and I feel absolutely certain that her second, Busy Being Free, will elicit the same response.

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. 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. 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 * 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 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.

The F**k-You Outfit

When you find yourself not lonely, but elated - elated to be alone with yourself, who you genuinely thought you might never get to see again? 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' 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”. 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.