Emma Forrest
If you want to be taken somewhere extraordinary, step into the shoes of Emma Forrest and live vicariously through her marriage to Hollywood actor Ben Mendelsohn, their divorce, starting again on her own in London (with a small daughter, CJ, in tow), scriptwriting and beyond, and see how she managed to change the way starting again ‘mid-life’ looks.
It’s a saucy read, one packed with humour and tenderness on every page. Chloe immediately started the memoir again, there was simply too much left to underline.
‘Beautiful’ Nigella Lawson |‘I adored it’ Dolly Alderton |‘Wonderful’ Lisa Taddeo | ‘Intoxicating’ Abi Morgan
What happens when your story doesn’t end the way you thought it would?
When you realise – after getting married and having a baby – that you chose wrong?
When the life you dreamt of becomes something you must walk away from?
And when you then find yourself not lonely, but elated – elated to be alone with yourself?
Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer
What does a typical day in the life of Emma Forrest look like in London?
I like writing very early before the world is awake properly (I do this instinctively but it’s actually a technique in Twyla Tharp’s book on creativity). As I get my kid ready for school, I eat porridge standing up with my laptop balanced on the bread bin, looking at homes for sale in cities I’ll never live in. When she’s finished every episode of The Muppets and I’ve gotten to the end of the internet, we go to school.
A great thing about London for problem solving a book, essay or script I may be writing is the different modes of transport seem to unlock different parts of my brain. So if I’m stuck, I’ll walk to a bus, which I’ll ride to a tube or a train and somewhere along the way an idea percolates, or I understand what I was trying to say, or I realise my book has one character too many.
How did you set yourself up for a day of writing Busy Being Free?
I was living in the attic flat from the book and the combination of a small space with a really epic view gave me the structure to let everything unfold in a way that I hope reads as dreamy but with a strong narrative pull. I’d directed the actress Jemima Kirke in my film Untogether, and one day her Mum Lorraine, who is an interior decorating maven, came into my too small flat and pushed furniture around to different walls and told me to lay plywood floor in my attic that I was using as an office, that I should then paint in cream and baby blue chequers. She did it all in eleven minutes and it unlocked something too: Oh! The things you own can move to different parts of the room! Maybe I took it as an allegory and about the memories filed forever in one part of my brain because I finished the book not long after.
You have a “smorgasbord of memories” of bad sexual experiences in one chapter, a “sensual memory excavation with thoughts of holding hands” in another, as well as details about your LA family-mansion by the dam, intimate vignettes of your marriage and divorce, and accounts of the man you slept with after your five years of post-divorce celibacy that’ll make anyone want to buy a Gucci scarf and not just for winter. It’s a truly vulnerable, female-empowering, soul-affirming risqué read. Were there any details you thought were too risqué to include and if so why did you end up keeping them in?
No, the cool thing about publishing a book is then all the unsafe things have not only been made safe through the writing process, but they are literally contained inside a book, that can be put up on a shelf, so you don’t have these difficult memories all over the floor to trip up over. I did for the first time though tell my parents I wasn’t giving them an advance copy or asking them to readings.
You write openly and candidly about your marriage to Ben, in fact it is intoxicating and mesmerising how you can articulate both the volatility and tenderness of him and your marriage. How did he respond after reading Busy Being Free? Was he surprised by any of the depictions of him?
No he wasn’t surprised. He had said “Just make me sound legendary” and that’s an easy ask. I gave it all to him to read when I was done and he left a voice mail I’ll always keep saying it was a spiritual book that he felt honoured to be a part of. He asked for a few changes and I made them.
In the preface you say, “He [Ben] also knows what it is to have a minor spritz of fame that isn’t worth the cost once the top note of success has burned away”, as though you too know. When do you feel your top note of success was?
Oh the top note is the most cloying note! That was when I was 16 and had a weekly column in The Sunday Times. I was learning how to write, I’m not at all sure I got there until a decade later, and I feel very grateful those columns were pre-internet.
Women can feel invisible in society when they reach middle-age. If anything, your memoir shows it should, and could, only get better - your independence, your ability to be alone, you do what you want, you’ve raised a daughter, still have amazing sex where your desires are met, and everything in between… Your memoir is like a portal into an alternative middle-age. Would you agree?
Yes, I agree. But I also felt it was magical to arrive back in the UK after all those years in America, and find these incredible middle aged female writers were so venerated: from the warm and accessible Caitlin Moran, to the cool, aloof brilliance of Rachel Cusk and for me the absolute touchstone is Deborah Levy and her three “Living Memoirs” as she describes them. She’s the best of the best - wisest, tenderest, greatest stylist - as far as I’m concerned.
The subtitle to Busy Being Free is Starting Again On Your Own. Would you say you are happier now having started again on your own, living in London, single, writing and publishing fantastic memoirs, and living what is maybe a more authentic version of yourself, rather than when you were living the supposed successful life (wealth, a family home, a partner… all those typical tropes!) In LA?
Yes, I definitely am, but by the same token I think L.A is a truly magical city when you’re open to the right things, and New York felt wonderful too the last time I was there. So, yes, I love the independence and freedom I feel both myself and my daughter have in London, but, real talk, I’d like all those things you get in a big city but also enable us to live in a house again one day instead of a flat. Deborah Levy is also really fixated on this in ‘Real estate’. We’ll get there, me, my kid, Deborah Levy…I trust the process.
If there’s one bit of advice you could give to a woman out there starting again on her own, what would it be?
Take a one year period of voluntary celibacy. Minimum! Allow yourself that silence to really listen to what you’re into now - might not be what or who you’d been into when you started having sex at 16 or however old you were…and if you know what you’re into, you can ask for it!
If there’s one thing you hope people reading Busy Being Free take from it, what would it be?
That I think the man in My Octopus Teacher did want to make love to the octopus, and I’m fine with that.