05/15/2017
Novelist Freed (The Servants’ Quarters), an English professor at UC Davis, wrestles with “the horror of being stuck where one lives” and, in opposition to that horror, her attachment to the comfort, intimacy and pride of home in this collection of personal essays that spans both decades and continents. The essays, all previously published, recount her childhood and adolescence in her native South Africa and her experiences as an exchange student and young bride in New York City, a visiting professor in Texas, and a long-time resident of Northern California, an inveterate traveler all the while. Wise, evocative and darkly humorous, Freed covers Disneyland, ecotourism, lovers, servants, her wariness of milestone-birthday celebrations and the accompanying “hysteria for public confession,” writers who are able to blossom in old age, and other topics. Particularly memorable are her essays about South Africa, as well as those about her upper-middle-class, mildly eccentric family’s place in it. This collection evokes different moods, different eras, and different places with an astute, frank, and pitch-perfect narrator. (Oct.)
06/15/2017
For award-winning author Freed (The Curse of the Appropriate Man; Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home), home is two places: America, where she lives, and South Africa, where she was born. This collection contains 20 previously published essays on writing, writers, and "somewhere else." "Multiple Choice" examines the idea of being committed, whether to a marriage, a job, or an airline ticket. "It's a Small, Unnatural World" describes the promise of a trip to Disneyland with a nine-year-old. "Honkey, Napoleon, & the Empress Woo" explains Freed's relationship with her family's housekeeper, who loved reading and a puppy named Honkey. "Locked In" reveals the fear of a small California community with a rapist on the loose. VERDICT Freed presents her life from many sides: Jewish child raised in South Africa, overdressed teenage exchange student among the hippies in New York City; cancer patient facing mortality; woman in the middle of her life alone in America, beautifully weaving all into thoughtful essays about life and writing.—Joyce Sparrow, Kenneth City, FL
2017-06-13
An offbeat world tour with a not-quite-innocent abroad.Novelist and essayist Freed (Emerita, English/Univ. of California; The Last Laugh, 2017, etc.) isn't the type to get hung up on wondering "should I stay or should I go?" She gets the urge for going, and she's gone. "As it happens," she writes, "I am at my most suggestible on the subject of belonging, because I am not much good at it." Wanderlust is what ties these funny and astute personal essays together; the book is about what it means to have an insatiable hunger for experience. Freed begins in, and frequently returns to, her homeland of South Africa, where she was born into a theatrical family amid the apartheid-era white bourgeoisie. She writes of the surface tension of revolt and how a mutual sense of distrust infects communication. A Zulu phrase book, for example, delivers commands with a Biblical tone, "intended to communicate to the servant that God is speaking." Freed skewers an ecotourist camp where, she notes with a twinge of glee, a lioness devoured a camper. Maybe, she reasons, "had the lioness not lost her natural fear of Man while recovering from her capture experience, she might never have come anywhere near the camp." In between visiting many countries over many years, Freed deals with love and mortality. There's cancer, which transforms shopping: "I wonder whether I was drawn to soaps and gels because, unlike, say, a belt or a pair of shoes, they could be counted upon not to outlast me." There's infidelity: "I could not bear the thought of a life spent repeating itself in virtue." And there is, finally, the clock ticking, as she considers how aging affects writing. This is travel literature as memoir, drolly covering the scope of a restless creative life.
Praise for The Romance of Elsewhere
"Freed approaches the world—and her prose—with the cleareyed, forthright wonder required of the most committed of travelers . . . Elsewhere she speaks eloquently of travel's power to transform . . . Freed is also one of the funniest writers around . . . [A] marvelous collection." —The New York Times Book Review
"If Joan Didion and Fran Lebowitz had a literary love child, she would be Lynn Freed—or, at least, the resulting book would be Lynn Freed’s essay collection, The Romance of Elsewhere . . . The collection of 20 previously–published essays spans decades and continents, and is in equal turns funny, wise, and sardonic; charting both Freed’s evolution as a traveler and her evolution as a writer. Travelers and readers seeking an unusually un–romanticized take on wandering the world will love it." —Bustle
"Her observations—on travel and writing, achievement and identity, Disneyland and aging—are revealing, and her drive to keep moving is unflagging." —The Mercury News
"Wise, evocative, and darkly humorous . . . This collection evokes different moods, different eras, and different places with an astute, frank, and pitch–perfect narrator." —Publishers Weekly
"Wanderlust is what ties these funny and astute personal essays together; the book is about what it means to have an insatiable hunger for experience . . . This is travel literature as memoir, drolly covering the scope of a restless creative life." —Kirkus Reviews
"Fans of Freed will enjoy reading (or rereading) these short works. Readers unfamiliar with her may find her, by turns, discerning or dyspeptic." —Booklist
"No one writes funnier, more acutely observant, frank, and intelligent personal essays than Lynn Freed. If her skeptical, sardonic voice amuses us with every line, it is largely because she is a grown–up in a culture of adolescence, who has done her psychological homework and taken the full measure of her experience, mistakes included. In this, her best nonfiction collection, you will come to know her narrator as one of the most nuanced and sophisticated characters in contemporary literature, and in the process make a new friend." —Phillip Lopate, author of A Mother's Tale
