Busy Being Free: A Lifelong Romantic is Seduced by Solitude

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By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. 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.

Regardless of content a page turner deserves 5 stars because it was compelling enough to keep turning to find out what was next.But the fact that she has written about this midlife excavation with such ferocity and frankness is cause for celebration. It is a memoir that magnificently captures decades’ worth of self-reflection around relationships, love, sex and forging a path back to one’s own identity when life takes unexpected turns. A staggering piece of writing' Nigella Lawson'It's woken me up' Minnie Driver, author of Managing Expectations'The most delicious memoir that kept me in bed all day' Sophie Heawood, author of The Hungover GamesWhat happens when your story doesn't end the way you thought it would? 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?

A teenage columnist for The Sunday Times, she became a music journalist and published her first novel, Namedropper, aged 22. 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? Still, I really loved reading Emma’s honest, messy, beautiful thoughts on motherhood, aging, sex and more. Not the sort of book I would normally pick to listen to on here (middle aged divorced man with interests in sport and comedy) but after reading a review in the paper decided to give it a go. Her sharply funny, yet incisively honest examinations of her life experiences as a deeper rumination on the human condition have engrossed readers for many years… and Busy Being Free is no exception.I was encapsulated in this world Emma describes so beautifully and looked forward to reading more every night before bed. Her most recent novel was the Radio 2 Book Club pick, Royals , praised by Marian Keyes, David Nicholls and Emma Jane Unsworth. Her insistence on comparing details in her present life with musings on her previous sexual encounters often jars.

A friend of mine was going through a divorce and this book helped me be a better support for her, even though she is far removed from Hollywood-type divorce. We met a variety of men during Busy Being Free – including both her worst sexual experiences, and then, later, some of her best – and despite their frequent appearance, Emma does a wonderful job of making the memoir about so much more than men. 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.

It took away from the real life situations she was describing rather than add anything to them and this grated on me at times.

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. I don't think most adult people are reacting to looks, clothes and measurements to the obsessive extent the author seems to think. It opens in London – where Forrest has moved to in the wake of her divorce from her Australian actor husband – when another mother visits her new flat and asks, “how did this happen to you? They can stay a decade or a year or six months or three months or one night and what they saw with you will not go away just because they have.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. As well as being elegantly written, Busy Being Free is eminently readable - a treasure trove of profound insights into love, lust and female desire. 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. 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. a very easy read, i smashed this in two afternoons; i unashamedly love emma’s writing and as someone who was deeply invested in her marriage to ben mendelsohn, this was so so fascinating.