Latest news with #EstherFreud
Sydney Morning Herald
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘She doesn't want to upset people - I probably do': Bella Freud on sister Esther
Fashion designer Bella Freud, 64, and her novelist sister Esther Freud, 62, are daughters of artist Lucian Freud and great-granddaughters to Sigmund. They were raised by their mother in the UK and Morocco. Esther: Even as a child, Bella had a lot of power. She was bright and capable and often angry, but she had such charisma. She would create situations that felt very daring and exciting. When she was nine, she became a passionate, paid-up member of the World Wildlife Fund. She found an old pram and we went from door to door for donations. I was about seven, and a neighbour reported she'd seen me straining to push this enormous, junk-filled vehicle up the road, with Bella sitting on top. When my mother asked about it, I thought, 'No, no: they don't understand. She allowed me to push her.' That's how powerful she was. Loading Interestingly, I don't think I was ever the subject of her anger. And she also had this enormous capacity for lighting up life; she was incredibly beguiling. Even now, I can say things to her that I can't say to anyone else. I can exaggerate my feelings with her, try things out on her. It's almost like a twin relationship, in that way: this alliance right at the centre of our lives. Sometimes, I think, 'Oh, I'll try not to talk to Bella about this', but I always crack. There just isn't anyone else who can unwrap life for me like her. I have mined my childhood for 35 years [as a fiction writer; her latest novel, My Sister and Other Lovers, is out now.] Some of it is very close to Bella and me, but she's like our father. I once wrote a character clearly based on him, and he said, 'For a horrible moment, I thought he was me, then I remembered, 'Oh no, I don't wear a watch.' ' Bella just says, 'It's fiction', and gives me her blessing. This last book, she said: 'Be sharper, harsher, clearer. Don't worry about hurting my feelings.' It was fabulous. 'I can exaggerate my feelings with Bella, try things out on her. It's almost like a twin relationship, in that way.' Esther Freud Just very recently, she's started her own writing: these beautiful little Sunday stories on Instagram. It's been so illuminating for me. As a child, I was caught between her and my mother – both very strong, fiery, outspoken – always just hoping things would settle down. Now I realise she was unhappy. She had a difficult relationship with our mother; she found the itinerant life we were leading, which actually rather suited me, extremely painful and difficult. It was like clear water, clear air, to finally understand that. And she seems so at peace and happy now; more compassionate for the past, for herself, for our family. I've always been so proud of her. When she first started to design clothes back in the '90s, she'd have these incredible catwalk shows with Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, Susie Bick [now Cave]. I've never been brilliant at clothes: I once tried on this lovely, soft, brushed-cotton brown shirt with her and she just said, 'Never, ever buy something unless it really suits you.' I said, 'But it's so comfortable!' and she just looked at me with this look – she lowers her eyes, then raises them – and said, 'Stop it.' Now she gives me things, utterly beautiful things. Some of them I've honestly worn for 25 years.
The Age
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
‘She doesn't want to upset people - I probably do': Bella Freud on sister Esther
Fashion designer Bella Freud, 64, and her novelist sister Esther Freud, 62, are daughters of artist Lucian Freud and great-granddaughters to Sigmund. They were raised by their mother in the UK and Morocco. Esther: Even as a child, Bella had a lot of power. She was bright and capable and often angry, but she had such charisma. She would create situations that felt very daring and exciting. When she was nine, she became a passionate, paid-up member of the World Wildlife Fund. She found an old pram and we went from door to door for donations. I was about seven, and a neighbour reported she'd seen me straining to push this enormous, junk-filled vehicle up the road, with Bella sitting on top. When my mother asked about it, I thought, 'No, no: they don't understand. She allowed me to push her.' That's how powerful she was. Loading Interestingly, I don't think I was ever the subject of her anger. And she also had this enormous capacity for lighting up life; she was incredibly beguiling. Even now, I can say things to her that I can't say to anyone else. I can exaggerate my feelings with her, try things out on her. It's almost like a twin relationship, in that way: this alliance right at the centre of our lives. Sometimes, I think, 'Oh, I'll try not to talk to Bella about this', but I always crack. There just isn't anyone else who can unwrap life for me like her. I have mined my childhood for 35 years [as a fiction writer; her latest novel, My Sister and Other Lovers, is out now.] Some of it is very close to Bella and me, but she's like our father. I once wrote a character clearly based on him, and he said, 'For a horrible moment, I thought he was me, then I remembered, 'Oh no, I don't wear a watch.' ' Bella just says, 'It's fiction', and gives me her blessing. This last book, she said: 'Be sharper, harsher, clearer. Don't worry about hurting my feelings.' It was fabulous. 'I can exaggerate my feelings with Bella, try things out on her. It's almost like a twin relationship, in that way.' Esther Freud Just very recently, she's started her own writing: these beautiful little Sunday stories on Instagram. It's been so illuminating for me. As a child, I was caught between her and my mother – both very strong, fiery, outspoken – always just hoping things would settle down. Now I realise she was unhappy. She had a difficult relationship with our mother; she found the itinerant life we were leading, which actually rather suited me, extremely painful and difficult. It was like clear water, clear air, to finally understand that. And she seems so at peace and happy now; more compassionate for the past, for herself, for our family. I've always been so proud of her. When she first started to design clothes back in the '90s, she'd have these incredible catwalk shows with Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, Susie Bick [now Cave]. I've never been brilliant at clothes: I once tried on this lovely, soft, brushed-cotton brown shirt with her and she just said, 'Never, ever buy something unless it really suits you.' I said, 'But it's so comfortable!' and she just looked at me with this look – she lowers her eyes, then raises them – and said, 'Stop it.' Now she gives me things, utterly beautiful things. Some of them I've honestly worn for 25 years.
Irish Times
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Esther Freud: ‘My sister always wants me to be harder, be meaner, be tougher. To cut through'
I meet Esther Freud in a north London cafe in advance of the publication of her 10th novel, My Sister and Other Lovers. It's 30 degrees outside so we order orange juice, and sit under a slow ceiling fan. The atmosphere in the cafe is charmingly chaotic: bright yellow walls, books and plants overspilling the shelves, the sound of chatter and cutlery clinking layered with Classic FM and the occasional burst of a passing car radio. Freud speaks with quiet assurance and pauses to consider her answers. Her demeanour is warm and curious. My Sister and Other Lovers marks a return to the highly autobiographical terrain Freud first mined in Hideous Kinky (1992), her breakout debut about a girl's unconventional childhood in Morocco with her sister and their bohemian mother. The father, an artist in London, is notable mainly for his absence. The author is the daughter of the artist Lucian Freud and Bernardine Coverley. Her sister is the fashion designer Bella Freud. READ MORE More than three decades later, she revisits this material from a different angle, looking at a different chapter in their lives. It is also a return to Ireland , where her mother was from and where Freud continues to draw from the painful, rich well of familial and national history. Her 2021 novel, I Couldn't Love You More , tackled the trauma of Ireland's mother and baby homes . This time around, though, the book emerged uncertainly. Freud describes a period of drifting after her last novel, coinciding with the start of the Covid pandemic. She turned to short stories, feeling they required less commitment. 'Almost before realising it,' she says, 'I had a book of short stories, and I wasn't that excited. I just felt quite pleased with myself in a slightly childish way, like, oh, that was easy.' That ease, she admits now, was a sign. 'Books do need to be quite hard to be good. Books have to be so good to touch you.' When she looked at the collection more closely, what stood out were the sisters: their communication, their lives, their deep connection. The stories were all titled after songs or albums – the first, called Desire, after the Bob Dylan album, was meant to be the title story. But something didn't feel right. The book wasn't about desire, not really. It was about love. It was about the sisters. And so, the title changed: My Sister and Other Lovers. At that moment, Freud realised she would need to begin again. Two more years passed as she reworked the short stories into a novel with a clear narrative arc. It was becoming a sequel of sorts to Hideous Kinky. At first, she resisted this idea, changing the characters' names, pushing them away. But eventually, she gave in. 'I used my own life and filled out the stories,' she says, 'and formed them into more of a narrative arc.' Freud has always been open about drawing from her own experiences, though she is rarely included in discussions around autofiction, a label often applied to contemporary women writers. 'I suppose because I always want to create a more traditional novel,' she reflects. But she is always up front about drawing from life. 'Maybe I out myself more readily than another writer might.' Esther Freud as a young girl Memoir and autofiction, she notes, come with a particular intensity. She has a great deal of respect for a lot of recent books that confuse the distinction between fact and fiction, but she isn't drawn to experimentalism in her own writing. 'Often those books can be quite academic. I'm not really so interested in that. What I'm interested in is story.' Still, she admits she worries about writing from life. 'Anything recognisable, I worry that someone will be offended,' she says. 'But the alternative is not writing something that will work in the book.' At a certain point in the process, a cold determination takes over: 'that famous splinter of ice in the heart'. The story becomes everything. Nothing else matters. 'It's terrible not to be able to write what you want to write.' Childhood remains one of her richest themes. Writing from the perspective of a child comes more naturally, she says. 'There's an ease to it. I love describing things seen for the first time.' Writing from the point of view of an adult woman, she finds more difficult. Perhaps it's related to another of Freud's themes: freedom. I've noticed that many of her characters seek to free themselves from familial or social constraints, and become trapped in other ways. She had never quite framed it that way herself, she says, but the observation resonates. 'I like to write about people who go on journeys to try to find a life that suits them better. I'm always dreaming of escaping. I love moving. My parents both lived life as they wanted to, and I think they understood that I had every right to do the same.' Freud moved often as a child, and Hideous Kinky was, in part, a testament to that instability and its unexpected gifts. When it was published in 1992, she recalls, many readers, particularly single mothers, expressed gratitude. Here, at last, was a child's perspective on a mother who didn't have many resources but still managed to prioritise adventure. 'There's so much criticism of those women who thought to do something differently,' she says. 'I thought the book was non-judgmental, but people didn't see it that way. I think if I wrote it now, as a mother, I'd be more careful. But when I wrote it I wrote it as if I was a child. That's what made the book work.' [ From the archive: Lucian Freud painting of teenage Irish lover seeks up to £10 million Opens in new window ] Male critics at the time were particularly ungenerous. 'They described the plot as this feckless hippie mother dragging her kids around. Well, she wasn't dragging us. Things then were really hard. There was no support. But she saved herself. And she gave me an enormous amount of inspiration.' With My Sister and Other Lovers, she returns to her family story from a more nuanced perspective. The novel investigates the undercurrents of sisterhood, the tensions that pull at relationships beneath the surface. 'I wanted to write about sisters and the complicated relationship sisters have with each other,' she explains. 'The tug of war that happens underneath every family story. Times when someone has a very different worldview and they want you to agree with theirs. You're trying to convince each other of the validity of the way you see things.' It's not nostalgia, exactly, though she admits to a remarkable memory for the small details of the past. 'Not for anything that useful,' she laughs. She can remember whole conversations. 'I spent quite a lot of time making life into stories when I was young, which probably helps keep memories alive. I think some people are less interested in that; in being reverent about what happened, turning it into a story. Maybe they live more in the present.' Writing, for her, involves bravery and curiosity. She believes a subject is worth pursuing only if it contains something mysterious. 'Often when I write I don't know how it's going to unravel,' she says. 'I really didn't know how the sisters' journey would go, I only knew a few stepping stones. A few scenes I really wanted to write. But I was saving them, as a reward for getting there. To be a good subject, you have to be really interested in it and you have to not know everything. I always want to be brave enough to go down into a subject that's close to me, to give myself permission to focus for however many months or even years on the thing that's interesting to me.' In this book, that mystery was the heart of the relationship between the sisters. To write it compellingly, she had to draw on her own deep and complex bond with her own sister. Has her sister read the book? 'Yes, she's one of my earliest readers. She's a very good reader. A very, very good editor. She has no time for superfluous or soft descriptions. She always wants me to be harder, be meaner, be tougher. To cut through. With each book, there's someone sitting on your shoulder, and with this one it was definitely her.'
Daily Mail
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Esther Freud is back in our picks for the best Literary Fiction out now: MY SISTER AND OTHER LOVERS by Esther Freud, FLASHLIGHT by Susan Choi, THE GIRLS WHO GREW BIG by Leila Mottley
MY SISTER AND OTHER LOVERS by Esther Freud (Bloomsbury £18.99, 288pp) This slim but capacious novel begins with narrator Lucy preparing for a premiere. Although not named, it's obvious that the film is Hideous Kinky, adapted in 1998 from Freud's largely autobiographical debut novel of the same name which featured the then five–year-old Lucy as the protagonist. Lucy's bruising but always engrossing passage from child to adulthood provides the arc here, and we're deeply with her at every moment, whether she's watching Eric and Ernie at Christmas while her beloved sister injects drugs upstairs, or suddenly discovering three previously unknown half-brothers (Freud's father, the artist Lucian, was rumoured to have 30 children). Freud's alternately painful and funny story may cleave close to her fascinating life, but it begs larger questions too as Lucy's insight grows into the lasting legacy of her rootless bohemian upbringing. FLASHLIGHT by Susan Choi (Jonathan Cape £20, 464pp) Spanning decades, oceans and political ideologies, the drama in Choi's epic novel takes place on the largest and most intimate of stages. At the centre are the Kangs: Serk, Anne and Louisa. Though born in Japan, Serk doesn't discover he's ethnically Korean until the end of the Second World War. He subsequently emigrates to America, where he marries Anne and fathers Louisa. Rage, not love, is default in this fractious family, which keeps the novel's first half at a roiling boil. Then a family trip to Japan takes an apparently tragic turn. The truth, however, is far stranger than fiction – cue a spoiler-forbidding plot that draws on an incredible episode in late 20th-century geopolitics. It makes for an expanse of narrative ground to cover, but Choi's startling, bristling characters power this journey, which plays in the reader's mind with cinematic intensity. THE GIRLS WHO GREW BIG by Leila Mottley (Fig Tree £16.99, 352pp) Motley's debut, Nightcrawling – written when she was just 17 – earned her a Booker Prize longlisting. Her ample talent is on display again in this loose sequel, which follows an improvised sisterhood of mostly teenage Floridian moms, 'the Girls'. Shunned by their small town's community, they provide each other with support. But when pregnant, would-be Olympic swimmer Adela arrives, the dynamic is disturbed. Clever Emory, who dreams of college admission, finds in the newcomer the friendship she's been starved of. But the unwitting Adela is on an explosive collision course with the Girls' ringleader, Simone. Motley's tough, vital lyricism drives a fiercely compassionate novel about survival, hope, and love.
Times
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Esther Freud — my favourite three books
Esther Freud, 62, was born in London, the daughter of the painter Lucian Freud and the great-granddaughter of the psychologist Sigmund Freud. After travelling the world with her mother, she returned to England in 1979, where she trained as an actress, appearing in The Bill and Doctor Who. She later became an author, best known for her 1992 semi-autobiographical novel Hideous Kinky. It recounts her unconventional childhood and was made into a film starring Kate Winslet. After writing her second novel, Peerless Flats, she was included in Granta's 1993 list of the best young British novelists. She has since written seven novels, including The Sea House and I Couldn't Love You More, and a play, Stitchers, that ran at the Jermyn Street Theatre in London in 2018. Her latest novel is My Sister and Other Lovers, a sequel to Hideous Kinky. In her 1995 novel The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald tells the story of the young and brilliant Friedrich 'Fritz' von Hardenberg, a master of dialectics and mathematics who becomes the great romantic poet and philosopher Novalis. Fitzgerald throws us headlong into the world of Leipzig in the 18th century and beguiles us with the wit and delicacy of her storytelling. The novel is surprising, eccentric and moving, and with a humour that is all her own it touches upon the illogicality of love and the irrationality of genius. To me it seemed to show that books are the best place to learn about life — both past and present — and proved how modern a historical novel could be. • 80 best books to take on holiday this summer — chosen by the experts A book that holds more stories than most is Michael Holroyd's A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and Their Remarkable Families (2008). It is a masterwork of biography, unravelling one life after another, illuminating the passions and triumphs of the Victorian stage and, later, the artistic and sexual adventures of the ensuing generations. Holroyd adds layer upon layer to his multi-character tale, full of affection for each of them and the chaotic nature of their lives. The marriages, the affairs and divorces, the children, cherished, abandoned, a great many of them the offspring of Terry's son, the set designer Edward Gordon Craig, one of whose children is born — with tragic consequences — to the dancer Isadora Duncan. This book is as engrossing and fantastical as any novel and reveals the single-minded self-involvement that can sweep up a great artist. • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List I have always loved Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys. It's not that Rhys is so very underrated, but her late novel Wide Sargasso Sea has overshadowed her earlier, more autobiographical books. I picked up my copy on a market stall just as I was beginning to write my first novel, and I have kept that copy in my study ever since as a talisman, a mark of what I most want to achieve. Voyage in the Dark (1934) tells the story of Anna, recently arrived from Dominica, working as an actress, touring the chillier, drabber seaside towns of Britain. It is written with spare elegance, the humour of the dialogue exquisite, and we are shown through Anna's dreamy, shivery reflections of West Indian life what this move from home has cost her. It's a story of belonging, of rootlessness, of prejudice, Anna's adventures fuelled by the hope that love might be the one thing that can save her. My Sister and Other Lovers by Esther Freud is out now (Bloomsbury £18.99). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
