Lynn Freed, South African writer with a wry style, dies at 79

Boston Globe

01-06-2025

'If Joan Didion and Fran Lebowitz had a literary love child, she would be Lynn Freed,' critic E. Ce Miller wrote in Bustle magazine, describing Dr. Freed's writing as 'in equal turns funny, wise and sardonic.'
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Raised by eccentric thespians in South Africa, Dr. Freed immigrated to New York City in the late 1960s to attend graduate school and later settled in California. Her first novel, 'Heart Change' (1982), was about a doctor who has an affair with her daughter's music teacher. It was a critical and commercial dud.
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Dr. Freed caught her literary wind in 1986 with her second novel, 'Home Ground,' which drew generously on her upbringing. Narrated by Ruth Frank, a Jewish girl whose parents run a theater and employ servants, the book subtly skewers the manners and lavish excesses of white families during apartheid.
'Here's a rarity: a novel about childhood and adolescence that never lapses into self-pity, that rings true in every emotion and incident, that regards adults sympathetically if unsparingly, that deals with serious thematic material, and that is quite deliciously funny,' Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post wrote in his review. 'It is also the flip side of rites-of-passage literary tradition, for its narrator is not a boy but a girl.'
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Writing in The New York Times Book Review, novelist Janette Turner Hospital praised the novel's keen point of view. 'Lynn Freed's guileless child-narrator takes us inside the neurosis of South Africa,' she wrote. 'We experience it in a way that is qualitatively different from watching the most graphic of news clips.'
Dr. Freed returned to Ruth Frank in 'The Bungalow' (1993). Now it's the 1970s, and Ruth is married and living in California. After separating from her husband, she returns to South Africa to care for her dying father. Staying in a seaside bungalow owned by a former lover, she confronts past loves and past lives in a country that is, like her, in transition.
In 'The Mirror' (1997), she told the story of Agnes La Grange, a 17-year-old English girl who immigrates to South Africa in 1920 to work as a housekeeper for a wealthy Jewish family and eventually finds her way into bed with her employer.
'The qualities with which Freed endows her heroine are fundamentally masculine, and through this comes a subtle but inescapable feminist message which makes 'The Mirror' more than a colonial family saga,' Isobel Montgomery wrote in her review for the British newspaper The Guardian.
Lynn Ruth Freed was born on July 18, 1945, in Durban, South Africa. Her parents, Harold and Anne (Moshal) Freed, ran a theater company. They were certainly characters.
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'As childhoods go, it would be hard to imagine a better one for a writer,' Holly Brubach wrote in the Times, reviewing Dr. Freed's essay collection 'Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home' (2005). 'The youngest of three girls, Freed was born into a family presided over by a histrionic mother and a debonair father.'
She graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, in 1966. She moved to New York City the next year to study English literature at Columbia University, where she earned a master's degree in 1968 and a doctorate in 1972.
Her books sold well, but they were never blockbusters. In 2002, she won the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award for fiction, among the most prestigious of literary prizes. She also won two O. Henry Awards for her short stories.
In interviews, she was often asked how much of her fiction was autobiographical.
'When I am writing properly -- which, I might say, comprises only a fraction of my writing time -- I tend to disappear into the fiction,' Dr. Freed said in an interview with Sarah Anne Johnson for the 2006 book 'The Very Telling: Conversations With American Writers.' 'What is the difference between remembered experience and imagined experience? I don't know.'
Dr. Freed's marriage to Gordon Gamsu in 1968 ended in divorce. Her second husband, Robert Kerwin, died in 2021.
In addition to her daughter, Jessica, she leaves two stepchildren, Fiona Zecca and Killian Kerwin; a granddaughter; and four step-grandchildren.
For many years, Dr. Freed taught writing at the University of California Davis. She was also a frequent -- and popular -- guest at writers' colonies. Friends said her readings were always packed.
'She was beautiful, and she was fun to be around,' writer Philip Lopate, a close friend, said in an interview. 'Her voice on the page was the same as she was in person. Her writing gave pleasure, just as she did in real life.'
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