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?”
On the surface, Busy Being Free is about the end of her marriage to actor Ben Mendelsohn, and the tectonic lifestyle shift involved in moving from their LA mansion to an attic flat in north London, then solo parenting her young daughter through a pandemic. But it’s about a great deal more than that. Forrest is examining, with an unflinching eye and a formidable cultural frame of reference (the title comes from Joni Mitchell’s song Cactus Tree), 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.
