Busy Being Free: A Lifelong Romantic is Seduced by Solitude

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Personal productivity… is the most important one, as it centres around the time that I make to spend with my family, my friends and doing things that fulfil me as a living person,” he wrote. “I know it’s odd to look at the time you spend with your family as being productive... but by doing so, I’m mentally making it more important. I’m giving it the same weighted value that I put on being able to keep a roof over my head and food on the table. Personal productivity keeps me human and reminds me what really matters in this world." 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. She only means to please them”. That’s the key line for me. A man’s ultimate goal is to achieve pleasure. A woman’s ultimate goal is to give pleasure. It’s hardwired into our brains and our psyches and our genitalia. But “Her heart is full and hollow like a cactus tree”. Who knows if a cactus tree really is full and hollow? Go ask a botanist, but who cares? Joni knows, and that’s all that matters. Forrest, now 45, had a hugely successful adolescence. A teenage columnist for The Sunday Times, she became a music journalist and published her first novel, Namedropper, aged 22. She went on to write more novels before leaving journalism to work as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Her 2011 memoir Your Voice in My Head detailed her experience with mental illness, suicide attempts and the death of her psychiatrist, and in part examined her relationship with the actor Colin Farrell.

Cactus Tree’ is a catalogue of her ex-lovers. She’s new to the city, untethered and unbridled, liberated, exploiting to the fullest the sexual freedom just becoming available to the fairer sex circa the spring of 1968. The imagery is seaside hippie throughout, the schooners and the beads and the flowers and the harbors. And her endless list of lovers, flaunting her freedom/promiscuity. Fabulous song, terrific lyrics which can take on a different meaning to each listener, not once but many times over the years. The Guitar is also very underrated! In the words of revered jazz critic Ira Gitler, she “has it all, and then some … artistic, swinging, and superbly entertaining.” Most of the little I understand of the female psyche I’ve learned from Joni Mitchell. I don’t take her to be emblematic of Womanhood. She’s an individual, with a unique vision of the world, but one that is profoundly female. She has thoughts and feelings and desires and disinclinations that seem to me engendered in that other side of the fence, visions and versions that would never cross my testeronic landscape. ‘Cactus Tree’ Lauded by everyone from Nigella Lawson to Lisa Taddeo, the title of Busy Being Free is taken from the song Cactus Tree by Joni Mitchell, in which Mitchell sings about an unnamed woman’s need for freedom and resistance to romantic commitment. In every case, the woman “thinks she loves them all” but ultimately is always “too busy being free.” – a notion which ties in beautifully with the melodies of Busy Being Free.Being busy has somehow become a badge of honor. The prevailing notion is that if you aren’t super busy, you aren’t important or hard working,” wrote Bradberry in his post How Being Busy Makes You Unproductive. “The truth is, busyness makes you less productive.”

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. 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.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”. But I’ve had a long and intense musical relationship with Joni for these 50-some years now. In each of the first eight years of her recording career she created a masterpiece. Some were love at first hearing, some took me even decades to embrace. One thing I’ve learned with Joni Mitchell – the more you focus and dig and concentrate and delve, the more you discover. You always get more than your money’s worth. The First Album I'm grateful for these supportive words about my work ... "Barbara Fasano sings with such deeply felt belief in her material that the art she practices is closer to pure expression than interpretation. Her take on 'Photographs', in which she brings at least three levels to the song at the same time, is worth the price of the CD."