Lynn Freed

Found this at a library book sale. Freed is not a writer I'd known. An expatriate from South Africa with several novels to her credit, this collection of essays about her peripatetic life is quite entertaining, but only up to a point. Because the pieces were written over a period of twenty-plus years, some of them cover the same material and become redundant. Especially interesting is her account of how her first successful novel, HOME GROUND, was something of a scandal when she brought it to tour in Durban and other South Africa venues and a major newspaper gave it the headline, "Sex with the Servants." And, a veteran of teaching in various college Creative Writing programs, she quite bluntly admits that it's something of a racket, that good writing is not something that can be taught. There is much here too of her many travels and a permanent sense of displacement which she has come to terms with after over forty years of living in the U.S., noting that a certain distance is necessary to write good fiction. And her portraits of her parents - amateur theater types - are especially good, and at times very moving.

READING, WRITING, AND LEAVING HOME: LIFE ON THE PAGE is a pretty good read, certainly worth the two bucks I paid for it. If you want a colorful, and very personal look inside the writing life, you might like this book. Highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (altro)