Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home

This collection by novelist and short story writer Lynn Freed is subtitled Life on the Page, but it could just as accurately be subtitled What It Takes—as in, what it takes to read with attention, to write with courage, and to leave home in order to make a life that allows for the work to be done. Writing requires distance, and distance comes at a price. Whether she’s writing about selling family secrets in a novel or teaching creative writing to pay the rent, Freed speaks to the cost. In her hands, it’s not about sacrifice so much as a kind of holy subordination.