Unafraid to confront messy contradictions, a second memoir from the author of Your Voice in My Head covers the end of her marriage and ‘tectonic shift’ from LA to north London
, and the tectonic lifestyle shift involved in moving from their LA mansion to an attic flat in north London, then solo parenting her young daughter through a pandemic. But it’s about a great deal more than that. Forrest is examining, with an unflinching eye and a formidable cultural frame of reference , what it means for a woman to find herself alone in her 40s and to redefine herself outside a context of marriage, motherhood and men.
She does not attempt to extrapolate universal meanings or turn her hard-won insights into lessons for other women In the aftermath of her break-up, Forrest embraces a voluntary period of celibacy, which she blames on the election of Trump. “Having to look at Donald Trump did not make me want to fuck,” she says, speaking for every woman alive . But it becomes clear as the book progresses that Trump is a convenient peg on which to hang this retreat from intimacy. “I took a vow of celibacy for the term of Trump’s presidency.
Early in her new London life, another mother looks around her tiny flat and asks, “How did this happen to you?” Forrest’s patchwork approach to the narrative is a way of giving this question a fuller answer. Moving between past and present, from childhood memories to her honeymoon, from conversations with her daughter to the raging rows of a dying marriage and a newly forged sexual confidence, she gradually builds a picture of the ways in which her romantic impulses have shaped her trajectory.
She doesn’t offer easy answers; there are none. The choices she makes for herself will no doubt appal some women and inspire others. But the fact that she has written about this midlife excavation with such ferocity and frankness is cause for celebration.
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