Lynn Freed, award-winning Bay Area author and teacher, dies at 79

San Francisco Chronicle​

6 hours ago

As a faculty member at Bread Loaf, the oldest and most prestigious writing conference in the country, Sonoma author Lynn Freed would get the attention of her students by arriving elegantly dressed and glamorous — an irregular style for a class at the top of a mountain in Vermont in the heat and humidity of summer.
She'd pick out a student's story and flip through it, then stop suddenly at a single sentence that stood out. Then she'd look at the author and announce in her South African English lilt, 'sink it, darling, shoot it through the knees.'
That was her way of advising the student to cut that line, and it only worked because Freed was so charming and funny in her delivery. Freed, who was also a professor of English at UC Davis, had a reputation for being an entertainer to the point that fellow faculty would audit her classes.
'Her Bread Loaf lectures would have people doubled over in laughter and shocked at her candor and her turns of phrase and wit,' said Christopher Castellani, writer in residence at Brandeis University and a faculty member at Bread Loaf, which is affiliated with Middlebury College.
Castellani got to know Freed when she stopped by his dorm room to borrow whatever clothes hangers he did not need — a standard means of introduction for Freed, who never could collect enough hangers for the wardrobe she brought to the 10-day conference.
'She had a very theatrical approach to teaching in the sense that she was a big personality,' Castellani said.
But she also had the words on the page to back it. Freed was the author of seven novels and a collection of stories, many of which draw on her extraordinary upbringing in a prominent family in the tight-knight Jewish community in Durban, South Africa, during apartheid. She also wrote a guidebook to her craft called 'Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home: Life on the Page.'
'She was adored by her students because she was the real deal,' said Patricia Hampl, a Minnesota memoirist, who served on the Bread Loaf faculty until 2016, as did Freed. 'She had presence and she had command, which is different from being performative.'
Freed, who made her home in San Francisco before decamping to Sonoma, died there May 9 after an 18-month fight against lymphoma, said her daughter, Jessica Gamsu. She was 79.
'She was tough and had incredibly high standards but was also very loving and generous and a wonderful hostess,' said Gamsu, who was raised in San Francisco and lives in Cape Town.
One beneficiary was Chronicle columnist Leah Garchik, who enjoys someone with a dry and cutting wit. She met Freed in a lunch group in the late 1980s, where a group of 25 or 30 creative women would go around the table and describe their latest book or endeavor.
'Lynn was a great subtle eye roller,' Garchik said. 'She did not do it in an obvious way, but once you understood that glance, you felt as though you were in on a delicious secret.'
When Freed released her novel 'The Mirror,' in 1997, Garchik attended a crowded reading at Books Inc. in San Francisco's Laurel Village. Freed arrived dressed beautifully in silk with a tiger's claw necklace.
'Listening to her read was like watching a play,' said Garchik. 'She had a very elegant voice and her delivery was forceful. It was obvious that she had grown up in a household where theater was part of everyday life.'
Lynn Ruth Freed was born July 18, 1945 in Durban, a coastal city on the Indian Ocean. Her parents, Harold and Anne Freed, did radio plays and ran a theater company. She first came to America as a high school exchange student with the American Field Service, spending a year in Greenwich, Conn.
After returning to Durban to finish high school, she attended the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, graduating in 1966. She returned to the United States in 1967 to attend graduate school in English literature at Columbia University in New York, where she earned her Ph.D in 1972.
By then she was married to Dr. Gordon Gamsu, a South African radiologist, who was living in New York. The couple relocated several times while Freed was in graduate school. They were living in Montreal, where Dr. Gamsu had a fellowship, when their daughter Jessica was born in 1970. They moved to San Francisco that same year, and Dr. Gamsu joined the faculty at UCSF.
They lived in a two-story home until their divorce in 1984. Freed kept the house until her daughter graduated from University High School. Jennifer Pitts, a childhood friend of Jessica's, recalled taking the 43-Masonic bus to Ashbury Terrace after school, far from her own home in Forest Hill, just to spend time under the spell of Freed.
'She was extraordinarily funny and outrageous, and told wonderful stories about her own childhood,' said Pitts, now chair of the political science department at the University of Chicago. 'A lot of these stories later found their way into her fiction, and we loved hearing them all over again.'
In 1989, Freed moved to Sonoma to live in a Victorian bungalow near the town square. She maintained the garden herself and wrote in a studio she had built on the property. For 35 years she was in a relationship with Robert Kerwin, a San Francisco writer whom she eventually married. He died in 2021.
From 2000 to 2015, Freed commuted to her faculty position at UC Davis. She also made the longer commute to the Squaw Valley Writers Conference, and to Bennington College in Vermont, where she was a member of the core faculty in the MFA program.
She was as strict with herself as she was with her writing students, as she made clear in 'Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home.'
'Writers are natural murderers,' she wrote. 'Their murderousness is a form of sociopathy fueled by resentment, scorn, glee, and deep affection. Before they can even begin writing they must kill off parents, siblings, lovers, mentors, friends — anyone, in short, whose opinion might matter.'
Freed did it well enough and for long enough to earn her recognition by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which awarded her the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award in fiction, in 2002. She also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She won the prestigious O. Henry Prize for short fiction for her story 'Sunshine,' in 2011, and for 'The Way Things are Going,' in 2015.
'She brought that laser beam of Freedian candor to everything she wrote and to any text she taught reviewed,' said Hampl.
Freed is best known for her autobiographical novel 'Home Ground,' published in 1986. Hampl, who recently reread all of Freed's works, said her masterpiece was 'The Mirror,' a short novel that manages to cover nearly a century of South African history in 219 pages.
'She could not write a flabby line,' Hampl said.
None of it came easily to her and she didn't make it easy on her writing students, either. One of her workshop techniques was to take a story, strip it down to the one sentence or phrase that was worth saving and instruct the writer to throw out the rest and start over based on that one passage.
'It was not for the faint of heart. She wasn't interested in making students just feel good about their writing,' said Castellani. 'She wanted to push them to write the best story they were capable of writing.'