Book #7: Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home, by Lynn Freed

For about a year I have been searching out books about writing: Stephen King’s On Writing, one by Annie Dillard, a couple of workbook-y things that appear to be part of a series, and most recently, Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home by Lynn Freed.
I have no idea who Lynn Freed is. I bought the book because of the picture on the cover: a young woman with neat 1950s hair, wearing a green dress and carrying a typewriter.
A chapter in, I almost gave up on the book. It was all about the writer’s childhood, her reactions to South Africa and her family, ie things guaranteed to bore me. I find that books about place which are written by people with a strong emotional connection to that place almost always do bore me. There’s no element of discovery, only justification of why the writer is writing about this. Ugh.
At any rate, I plowed on. The book was a convenient size for tossing in my backpack and reading in bed. And I still liked the picture on the cover.
Partway in, the author finally got around to talking about writing: the frustration of false starts, the need to bury or immerse oneself in words to make anything work. “Fiction does not come out of ideas....” “I had deafened myself with thinking....” “A wonderful thing happened. I gave up.” “I opened the notebook and wrote ‘Untitled.’ Then I had to lie down on the bed and sleep for the rest of the day.”
And from talking about writing, to talking about travel: “I have always been a natural foreigner.”
And about the course of life: “still I was asking myself the question I had been asking for as long as I can remember: Is this what you want? ... only now did an answer arrive without a hint of prevarication: No.”
And finally, and most important to me currently, about writing programs, about workshops, about MFAs: a long chapter about the misery of teaching in such, about the inherent contradiction between an environment of incremental progress in a group setting and the solitary nature of getting words down on the page. I read this as justification for not studying what I spend time on, both visual and textual, for the arrogance of thinking I can churn out a manuscript in the next few months. I read this as a challenge, or, better-phrased (since my response to challenges is usually to glare and decide not to play) as inspiration.
Those parts of the book, I couldn’t put down.
I only wish those parts of the book composed more than half.
So I am left with a quandary: give it shelf space? Photocopy the chapters that matter to me and sell it off? Reread it again in a year and see what I think?
I still like the photo of the girl in the green dress, staring out so precisely with her typewriter in hand.