Busy Being Free: A Lifelong Romantic is Seduced by Solitude

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Biography: Born in London, Emma Forrest began her writing career as a teenage columnist on the Sunday Times, going on to have columns in The Guardian, the Independent and Elle.

This book picks up where “Your Voice In My Head” leaves off, and gives the same honest self-examination that you’d expect. It's a shame as there is some beautiful writing, but you have to sift through a lot of waffle to find it. e. talking about her husband’s obsession with a Kanye West song or her toyboy being ridiculously cool) just annoyed me.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. I think she might be a genius'
Sophie Heawood, author of The Hungover Games

'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'
Minnie Driver

From the author of Your Voice in My Head and Royals comes a beautiful, breath-taking, unputdownable memoir about love and heartbreak, sex and celibacy, growing up and starting again.

It is written in vignettes that felt repetitive at times and I couldn't keep the men straight, but maybe that is by design.Regardless of content a page turner deserves 5 stars because it was compelling enough to keep turning to find out what was next. she understands her daughter’s disappointment at a party cake that she believes to be chocolate flavoured, but that is in fact Sachertorte – “a grown-up cake for a grown-up party – not especially sweet, no buttercream inside, just bitter marmalade”. Her insistence on comparing details in her present life with musings on her previous sexual encounters often jars. So it feels so familiar and cozy eg I started reading the sample and got furious trying to work out how to read the full book.

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.It made me laugh when she highly recommended being creative without having to worry about paying the bills. I did like her descriptions of the women in her life, and that some bits were very honest and emotional, with real pockets of insight (just annoying that they were always shortly followed by something shallow or vapid).