Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home
Life on the Page
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“In her keen-eyed and hilariously funny new book . . . novelist and memoirist Lynn Freed tells how writers deal with life’s large and little tribulations” (O, The Oprah Magazine).
These eleven essays combine a memoir of an exotic life, reflections on the art and craft of writing, and a brilliant examination of the ever-complex relationship between fiction and life. “Taming the Gorgon,” an account of translating a difficult parent into fiction becomes a poignant and funny meditation on the intricate knot binding mothers and daughters. The story of a scandal created by publication, “Sex with the Servants” is an inquiry into the porous boundary between private truth and public betrayal.
“Distinguished by its emotional honesty and stylish prose,” this blend of lively autobiography and inspiring wisdom puts aside all the fictional disguises and exposes the human being behind the artist (Chicago Tribune).
“Lynn Freed is a beautiful writer, dead-on brilliant, rich in humor, possessing a dark and comforting wisdom.” —Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird
“To the tiny list of necessary books for people who aspire to the writing life . . . must now be added Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home.” —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Freed, author of five novels and, most recently, the story collection The Curse of the Appropriate Man, offers insights into her writing and her life in 11 clean, incisive essays that mix the personal with the instructional without going too deeply into either. How autobiography shapes fiction particularly interests her: in "Sex with the Servants," Freed describes how her novel Home Ground caused a scandal in her native South Africa (at the few book-related events that weren't cancelled, all anyone wanted to know was if she'd really touched her garden boy's penis). Her family, who also appeared in print, were not nearly as outraged, and for would-be writers, Freed offers several firm pronouncements ("Writers themselves are natural murderers"; "The real writer... is a moral reprobate"), which suggest that to worry about others' feelings cheapens one's art. This apologia for the way writers skewer those around them shares space with a careful consideration of her own work's themes alienation, family, home, travel, performance episodic but interesting glimpses into Freed's life (a larger-than-life mother, a wild family, a troubled marriage, a difficult gig teaching writing). Freed's honesty is always tempered by what feels like cool reserve, but this nevertheless is an instructive, enlightening book. 10 b&w photos.
