the fact that she has written about this mid life excavation with such ferocity and frankness is cause for celebration. On acquiring the book, publishing director for Orion Lettice Franklin described it as “a memoir about what it is to find oneself, in the middle of your life, at a bump in the road; about the romance to be found in leaving a marriage and starting out alone; about sex and celibacy. 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.

Published in paperback this week, the memoir asks: “What happens when your story doesn’t end the way you thought it would? And her ex-husband was straight up abusive at points but those behaviors are sort of described as just personality quirks. Far worse, there is an offensive and needless attempt at humour in which Forrest equates muting a WhatsApp conversation but still checking for messages with trying to “shield myself from temptation” from snacking on a plate of chips by covering it with a napkin: “The paper-towel burka quickly lifted”.When Ben visits Emma during lockdown before travelling to Italy for filming, Emma goes upstairs one evening and finds him asleep, his Brazilian girlfriend still on the tablet. 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”. And in spite of all of the talk about relationships unravelling and self-discovery, it’s unabashedly sexy too.

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 don't think most adult people are reacting to looks, clothes and measurements to the obsessive extent the author seems to think. Sexual confidence is one thing, and admirable, but reviewing your whole life in terms of how disruptively irresistible you've been just feels really vain, not to mention limited in terms of what insight it can bring.

Reading Busy Being Free isn't like reading at all, in the sense that you will never look at how many pages you have left, or wonder whether this was the page you got stuck on last night before sleep. Uumlber den AutorrnrnBorn in London, Emma Forrest began her writing career as a teenage columnist on the Sunday Times, going on to have columns in The Guardian, the Independent and Elle. Busy Being Free utterly thrilled me with its exposition of loneliness, solitude, and the differences between the two.

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When, after a life guided by romantic obsession, you decide to turn your back not only on marriage, but all romantic and sexual attachments? 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 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.

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? 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. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions.