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?” Forrest is a spirited, energetic writer, and this book, made up of short, vignette-like chapters, flits rapidly between time frames and anecdotes. It’s lively text, but can feel frenzied. Her insistence on comparing details in her present life with musings on her previous sexual encounters often jars.

This is the most romantic book you’ll ever read about deciding to be single. This is a memoir about love and heartbreak, about sex and celibacy, about marriage and divorce, and what comes after that. Further reading Forrest said: “I've found, in Lettice Franklin, the most generous and insightful editor a writer could hope for. And I found, in Weidenfeld & Nicolson, a publisher eager to bring me to a broader audience—exciting both as a woman in her forties who has been published since her teens and as a woman who had been alone in a flat with her kid for six months. Your Voice In My Head seemed to resonate with readers because I wrote it to keep myself alive."

Immediately after her divorce, she recalls, she went on a date with a man who was wearing a T-shirt of “the wrong fabric”, the type that “would not fall into the right-shaped heap on the bedroom floor were he to remove it”, and so of course (of course!) 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”. Neither episode illuminates anything about the other. However, Forrest’s misery about her “small top-floor flat” seems trivial when she flaunts the wealth she continues to enjoy, including a custom-made spiral staircase, with a cut-out design to “cast light around the small space”. She goes on to move into another property, renting out the first. References to Balenciaga shoes, Gucci scarves and the numerous celebrities with whom she has brushed shoulders abound – and are always pretentious. Busy Being Free: A Lifelong Romantic is Seduced by Solitude is tipped as “a beautiful, breathtaking, unputdownable memoir about love and heartbreak, sex and celibacy, growing up and starting again”. 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. Which led me to this affair. To have the man you love, but who won’t commit, have his hands on your breasts under the T-shirt given to you by the man who is pursuing you… It was an elixir for a 25-year-old testing their emotional volume control.

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'

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. I took comfort in many of the things she revealed she processed post divorce and her exploration of shame and disappointment. We met a variety of men during Busy Being Free – including both her worst sexual experiences, and then, later, some of her best – and despite their frequent appearance, Emma does a wonderful job of making the memoir about so much more than men. Her writing hums with life, honesty and intelligence and underneath the romance and red carpets is loneliness and vulnerability. -- Marianne Power * THE TIMES * It was well written and funny at times, and I liked the introductory chapters, but quite a bit of it seemed like empty good writing, sort of beautiful, and it felt like she was trying to make it profound, but ultimately meaningless.

In photos, I was very slim and there are only stolen glimpses of this Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band T-shirt, which seems appropriate since the man who gave it to me was someone I was having an affair with. He lived in a Californian mansion and I lived in a tiny New York studio where the landlord couldn’t believe my parents didn’t have enough money to co-sign. Especially for women. Especially as we are deemed, with each passing decade, to be of diminishing value. Because someone who is that crazy, someone who takes beyond their fair share with their broken energy, cannot be the one to tell you you no longer exist.”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. Writer Emma Forrest is switching from Bloomsbury to Weidenfeld & Nicolson with anew memoir, Busy Being Free, billed as "a love letter to being alive or alone". Compelling, mystical, deeply moving, darkly funny. Busy Being Free is a poetic, incisive, uncensored study of female solitude. I adored it. * Dolly Alderton * Having said that, there were parts of the book that I really enjoyed and that also made me reflect on my own experiences in a new light. She redeemed herself for the fact I had to keep looking up words.

For someone whose career has started in journalism, I didn’t ask anybody anywhere any of the most basic questions. I asked some interesting abstract ones. I think this made for good interviews and less successful life choices.” A heart-rending and acerbic memoir of appetite and abstinence -- Polly Samson, author of A Theatre for Dreamers I was at the cemetery, admiring the flowers and books at the graves of Karl Marx and Douglas Adams. The thing found most painful about divorce is that there was no Mark spot at which to leave offerings…. Songs are the place to leave offerings by everything you lost and everything that stayed - and they’re the flowers too.” She does not attempt to extrapolate universal meanings or turn her hard-won insights into lessons for other women 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 -- Minnie Driver, author of Managing ExpectationsFranklin 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.