Busy Being Free: A Lifelong Romantic is Seduced by Solitude

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Indian Hill High School 2023 Europe Tour Choir(from "Indian Hill Choirs Europe Choir Tour Send-Off Concert (Live)"-2023) In one chapter she reflects on her worst sexual experiences, including several from her time as a precociously talented 16-year-old thrust into the adult world of newspaper journalism that would certainly qualify for #MeToo revision. “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.” But she goes on to say: “The interesting part is that I voluntarily kept seeing him for a few weeks.” 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, though I wonder if there is a generational aspect to this; it’s possible that younger women may not be as relaxed about, say, the blurring of professional and sexual relationships that Forrest regards as largely positive.

Karma from NyShe's singing about being free and the guys who want her to settle down with them. She thinks she might love them all but she doesn't want to settle down. She doesn't want to hurt them but hey, would you settle down if you looked like Joni, had her intelligence and talent and was just getting started? I know I wouldn't. But yeah, it must have hurt to have so many wanting a committment from her; kinda selfish on their part in my humble opinion. Nonetheless, I think it made her feel bad...guilty...that they were hurt. She still wanted to see them but she didn't want to see one of them only and be tied down. Good for her. Franklin said: “I have worshipped Emma Forrest from afar for a very long time. She is one of our very best writers. Her first memoir Your Voice in My Head is a cult classic that inspires total passion from all who read it, and I feel absolutely certain that her second, Busy Being Free, will elicit the same response.At the beginning of the fourth verse, our narrator appears casually, almost obscured in the crowd of her lovers – “There’s a lady in the city and she thinks she loves them all.” ‘Love’, Joni? She has a genuine affection towards each and every one, albeit transient. But we’re talking about a girl who knows how to have a good time. Every night, a new good time. Most of the little I understand of the female psyche I’ve learned from Joni Mitchell. I don’t take her to be emblematic of Womanhood. She’s an individual, with a unique vision of the world, but one that is profoundly female. She has thoughts and feelings and desires and disinclinations that seem to me engendered in that other side of the fence, visions and versions that would never cross my testeronic landscape. ‘Cactus Tree’ I’ve loved Emma Forrest since her first novel, Namedropper. This is perhaps her strongest book. Her writing has deepened and certain lines grabbed my heart. Still, I didn’t give it 5 stars because the ending seemed rushed to be tidied with a nice bow. And her ex-husband was straight up abusive at points but those behaviors are sort of described as just personality quirks. I don’t know if that’s how it was edited or if Emma has blinders about that. Still, I really loved reading Emma’s honest, messy, beautiful thoughts on motherhood, aging, sex and more. 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?” The narrative weaves between Emma’s life before, during and after her marriage, and it offers readers an intimate look at the life of an enduring romantic as she navigates leaving London behind for New York, and then sunny California, before returning to London – the city that had ‘shamed her’ to solo parent her young daughter during the pandemic.

Cactus Tree was written on October 12, 1967. Joni introduced it this way on that date at the Second Fret in Philadelphia: When you find yourself not lonely, but elated– elated to be alone with yourself, who you genuinely thought you might never get to see again?It seems our Joni is the Lady of the Hour, so I’m going to share with you the whole shaggydog tale of how I encountered her, how I fell in love with her, and how I broke her heart. Okay, hurt her feelings. A little bit. Maybe. Or not. Whatever. First Flowers in a Fertile Field She will love them when she sees them,” each and every one on his own terms. For the time that she sees him. Till she moves on. And if they try to hold her, they lose her. Don’t forget, this was March, 1968—the very dawn of the sexual revolution. Prior to this, women did not have sex outside marriage. Certainly not with innumerable partners. Or at least they didn’t talk about it. The Hungover Games by Sophie Heawood is one of the only books I have allowed myself to re-read in recent years. A hilarious memoir based between London and LA, such is my obsession with it that I will read anything and everything that Heawood subsequently recommends. And so it was that when she recently shared a picture of Busy Being Free by Emma Forrest on its publication day, I soon after bought it, and moved it to the top of my ever-growing pile of books I Want To Finish Before The Year Is Out. It made me laugh when she highly recommended being creative without having to worry about paying the bills. I wish. She moaned about not being able to afford to buy a place in London with a garden. Most people can’t even afford to live there period. But I tried to stay with her frame of reference and could see that coming from a huge Californian house would be a huge adjustment and I accepted her invite into her assimilation and transformation, warts and all.