Quotes
A staggering piece of writing: I had to start it again the minute I finished reading it, and it was just as shocking, absorbing and beautiful on rereading
Compelling, mystical, deeply moving, darkly funny. Busy Being Free is a poetic, incisive, uncensored study of female solitude. I adored it. Dolly Alderton
Alluring, shocking, welcome and wonderful
The most delicious memoir that kept me in bed all day. 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 think she might be a genius. Eve Babitz didn't die, she just regenerated as Emma Forrest
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. This deep part of ourselves that somehow gets side-lined and subordinated by everything else. This ecstatic voice we so often manage to ignore. I can hear Emma's voice though, and it's woken me up
Busy Being Free utterly thrilled me with its exposition of loneliness, solitude, and the differences between the two.
How wonderful to be privy to many sides of a marriage and what comes after it, how wonderful to be shown so vividly that the end of a formal relationship is not the end of life nor even the end of that particular love. Emma Forrest is a master of voicing those human instincts and thoughts which feel too murky or ingrained to be articulated, and yet here she is doing so with enviable elegance on every page
A heart-rending and acerbic memoir of appetite and abstinence
Emma Forrest can write the hell out of anything but where she truly excels is when she's writing about her life, which is often like something out of a novel... A glorious, sharp-as-a-tack-but-full-of-soul exploration of heartbreak and what happens next. RED MAGAZINE
Her writing hums with life, honesty and intelligence and underneath the romance and red carpets is loneliness and vulnerability. THE TIMES
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. THE OBSERVER
