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 "Leaving home is perhaps the central experience of the Writer’s life. It is this enigma that informs the writer’s perspective – the restless pursuit of a way back while remaining steadfastly at a distance."

Equal parts revelation and inspiration, these eleven essays combine a memoir of an exotic life, reflections on the art and craft of writing, and a brilliant examination of the always complex relationship between fiction and life. In Taming the Gorgon an account of translating a difficult mother into fiction becomes a poignant and hilarious meditation on the intricate knot binding mothers and daughters. In Sex with the Servants, the story of a scandal created by publication, becomes a brilliant inquiry into the porous boundary between private truth and public betrayal. Whether examining the difference between a story told and a story written or the trials and rigors of teaching writing to pay the rent, Freed surprises, instructs and entertains.

Learned, opinionated and wickedly funny, Freed tears off all fictional disguises and exposes the human being behind the artist. Destined to become a classic, Reading, Writing and Leaving home is essential reading for writers, readers, anyone engaged in literature.

Reviews:
"Lynn Freed is a beautiful writer, dead-on brilliant, rich in humor, possessing a dark and comforting wisdom."
-- Anne Lamott
"Marvelous. I’ve never read another book like this. Lively, funny, at once a vivid and moving memoir and a collection of uncommonly sensible observations about writing."
-- Mark Childress
"Freed's voice is individual – funny, sharp, trenchant, and with a great intellectual and emotional range. She is especially witty and smart in this form.This is a wonderful collection."
-- Diane Johnson

Publisher: Harcourt (September 5, 2005)
ISBN: 015101132X
Paperback: 256 pages



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The Curse of the Appropriate Man
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 Lynn Freed has been widely praised as one of most fearless and sophisticated explorers of sexual and filial love. These fourteen short stories, written over the past ten years but never before collected, are vintage Freed. They deal with the struggle between mothers and their wayward daughters, with the often preposterous bonds that tie men and women together, and with the complex games that masters and servants play. In spare, elegant prose, Ms. Freed delivers surprise after surprise as she shakes the truth from life. Whether she is portraying a mother mired in senile dementia in "Ma, A Memoir," a young girl experiencing her first sexual encounter with an itinerant knife sharpener in "Under the House," or a young woman incapable of loving conventionally in "An Error of Desire," Freed portrays the absurdity, the delusions, the dramas and the dignity of her characters' lives.

Reviews:
"A witty, accomplished debut collection . . . Fourteen sophisticated treasures."
-- Kirkus Reviews
"Freed creates achingly real women and lovingly rendered misfits . . . Quietly devastating and deeply resonant."
-- Publishers Weekly
"Her style -- spare, tough, unflinching -- and her subject matter -- the thorny issue of women's desire -- are firmly established. Whether set in her native South Africa, in the United States or on unnamed islands, her fiction follows women driven by their visceral impulses, women who live in worlds where men matter, where looks matter, where sex matters -- a lot."
-- The New York Times Book Review

Publisher: Harvest Books; (September 1, 2004)
ISBN: 0156029944
Paperback: 208 pages



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 HOUSE OF WOMEN is the story of three unusual women – seventeen-year-old Thea, her mother Nalia, an opera singer and Holocaust survivor, and Maude, their dour and religious housekeeper. It is the story of how the world changes for each of them when a man comes to take Thea away.

"The rule is this: says Thea, I am to pretend that my other life does not exist. And yet pretending, it seems to be true." Stark, philosophical and surprising, HOUSE OF WOMEN is a tale of passion, love, secrets, and bonds that cannot be broken, even in death...

What people are saying:
"Reading Lynn Freed's HOUSE OF WOMEN, I was subject to feelings I remember from first reading the classics when I was young: sensations of familiarity and strangeness conjoined. Like certain classics, Freed's novel is surprising and inevitable, often in the same sentence. It illuminates and, at the same time, deepens the human mystery. I don't ask for more from a book."
-- Michael Cunningham, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction
"Powerful and strange, Lynn Freed's HOUSE OF WOMEN dissects human emotions, especially family emotions, almost as myth does, going straight to the essence with hypnotic assurance."
-- Diane Johnson, author of LE DIVORCE and LE MARIAGE
"Lynn Freed is a brilliant, magical writer."
-- Anne Lamott,
author of OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS and TRAVELING MERCIES

Reviews:
"Elements of not one but many fairy tales provide an irresistible -- ravenous -- undertow for Lynn Freed's new novel, "House of Women," a story in which a mother and daughter fight to the death . . . An unusual and unusually satisfying novel."
-- Kathryn Harrison, The New York Times Book Review
"There is not a word out of place in this novel . . . Freed delves deep into the morass of sexual and filial love without mitigating complexity, and leads her reader toward insight and understanding with a deft and delicate touch."
-- The Washington Post Book World
"With poetic intensity, the novel weighs the explicit power of actions against the subtler but no less potent one of words"
-- Vogue
"Feeling the chill? Escape into Lynn Freed's HOUSE OF WOMEN"
-- Vanity Fair
"Lock yourself up with this literary novel about mother-daughter ties"
-- Glamour
"A quietly suspenseful tale of a marriage that is both an escape from a
powerfully sexual mother and manipulative father and an unpredictable journey
to the heart of her authentic desires"
-- O Magazine
"This other-worldly tale philosophizes smartly on what it is to crave love
and to sacrifice clarity for passion"
-- Publishers' Weekly

Read an exerpt from House of Women

Published By:

2002
• Little, Brown & Co



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 SELECTED 1997 NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR by THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

This is the story of Agnes La Grange, a beautiful young woman who emigrates as a housekeeper to South Africa in 1920. With a determination to make a future of her own and a love of men that does not leave her in desperate need of them, Agnes constructs a life beyond the conventions of colonial society. Written in her own fresh and unguarded voice, The Mirror is a fictional memoire, telling the story of the essential female, what she must do to survive, and how little the cost has changed over time.

Reviews:
"Masterful... Agnes tells her story with the bare-souled candor of a Billie Holiday ballad."
-- The San Francisco Chronicle
Like so many of the best books, The Mirror makes us laugh while packing, finally, a punch."
-- New York Times Book Review
"(Freed) wonderfully carries off that hardest of all literary effects -- it feels effortless and therefore absolutely real, as if Freed just sat down by the fire one night and told the tale of a woman she'd once known. Freed's language brings Agnes's world . . . vividly to life."
-- Elle Magazine
"Agnes is Moll Flanders without excuses -- an enchanting and infuriating heroine, both admirable and wrongheaded in her commitment to honesty and her pursuit of adventure."
-- Entertainment Weekly (Grade: A)
"I'd say it's feminist fiction in the mode of Flaubert and Daniel Defoe. Agnes La Grange is the Moll Flanders of Durban, South Africa. You'll want to live her fascinating life along with her."
-- All Things Considered (NPR)

Read an exerpt from The Mirror

Published By:

1999
• Ballantine Books, New York
• Flamingo Books, HarperCollins, UK
• Modan Publishers, Israel

1998
• as Der Spiegel, Goldmann, Germany

1997
• Crown Publishers, New York



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 Selected 1993 NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR by THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

In1975, Ruth Frank, married and living in the United States, returns to South Africa to visit her aging parents. There she resumes an old liaison with Hugh Stillington, liberal man of Africa, who lives in a bungalow overlooking the Indian Ocean. Hugh’s world is a South Africa Ruth has never known -- lush, wild, comfortably dilapidated, socially and politically courageous. Intoxicated, she begins to feel at home there, setting herself beyond the pale of her own society, and in the way of danger.

Reviews:
"Time, memory, identity, continuity and exile: Freed is caught up in a white South African version of expatriation in which one never finally leaves home . . . The refreshing aspect of her account, however, is how these deeper themes are enmeshed with a positively wicked sense of humor."
-- The Boston Sunday Globe
"Deeply absorbing and ambitious . . . astonishingly vivid."
-- Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Ms. Freed portrays the theatrical atmosphere in which class and taste are assessed and sustained through clothes, food, hairstyles and interior decoration, while the black servants vacuum and cook, argue and laugh, until they are finally sent off duty to the back of the house, leaving the whites a fragile privacy at the end of the day, when sherry is poured from cut-glass decanters . . . Ms. Freed avoids simple labels of good and bad, and that is what makes her novel so arresting."
-- The New York Times Book Review

Read an exerpt from The Bungalow

Published By:

1999
• Story Line Press, Ashland, OR
• as Der Bungalow, Goldmann, Germany

1993
• Poseidon Press, (Simon & Schuster), New York



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 SELECTED 1986 NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR by THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

Set in South Africa in the ‘fifties and ‘sixties, this is the story of Ruth, youngest of three daughters in the flamboyant, theatrical Frank family. Brash, clear-eyed and passionate, Ruth moves through a decade of drama on every front -- the family, the servants, the theatre, and the country at large -- wondering always how she will escape into the "real world" at last.

Reviews:
"Here's a rarity: a novel about childhood and adolescence that never lapses into self-pity, that rings true . . that regards adults sympathetically if unsparingly, that deals with serious thematic material, and that is quite deliciously funny. Home Ground is all this and more."
-- Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World
"Freed's guileless child-narrator takes us inside the neurosis of South Africa."
-- The New York Times Book Review
"Home Ground is crisp and uncluttered. The dialogue is sharp and colorfully idiomatic. It is often funny, particularly in scenes of Ruth's youthful sexual explorations and in the missed connections between black and white. Freed . . . captures the quality of complacent unreality that has pervaded white South Africa."
-- The Philadephia Inquirer

Read an exerpt from Home Ground

Published By:

1999
• Story Line Press, Ashland, OR

1988
• Penguin Books Ltd., London

1987
• Viking Penguin, New York

1986
• William Heinemann Ltd., London
• Summit Books (Simon & Schuster), New York



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 (Formerly HEART CHANGE)

At thirty-six, Marion Roth is settled, uneasily, into a life of middle class order -- a house on a good street, a career and family in place. And then she meets José, her natural opposite. He is sensual, artistic, impulsive, desirable, and also, unfortunately, the object of her daughter’s teenage passion. Following her impulses, Marion swerves off course and into a future that surprises everyone, most particularly herself.

Reviews:
"Freed's prose pleases both mind and spirit . . . These are interesting people, especially our heroine, who has everything except "the independence of spirit to turn away from achieved success , to spin her own webs of wonder."
-- Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Lynn Freed has written an anti-romance in romance clothing. Perhaps for today's psychologically-minded liberated women (this) is is the only viable kind of romance around."
-- The Oakland Tribune

Read an exerpt from Friends of the Family

Published By:

2000
• Story Line Press, Ashland, OR

1984
• Chivers Press, Bath, UK



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© 1999 - 2005 Lynn R. Freed. All Rights Reserved.