Lynn Freed (1945-2025)

"What is truth if not the life at the very heart of failure?"

The writer Lynn Freed has died. I met her at Yaddo many years ago: she was a neighbor of mine in the West House during a summer that I was working on a novel. We had a several exchanges in the years since, and in each message I see myself trying to be funny about whatever situation both of us were complaining about. Lynn loved to complain. Her complaints were intelligent and quickly sought complexity. And the kind of complaining she did (I mean, complaining about others complaining) was cutting and hilarious. Read this piece in Narrative Magazine to be in touch with her honesty! (If you want, you can also hear her voice here for 20 seconds.) The photograph above is taken from the Civitella Ranieri website where she is also cited as offering these probing lines: “For what is writing, after all, but a bid for the truth? And what is truth if not the life at the very heart of failure?”

Lynn wrote seven novels and also books of essays. One of my absolute favorite things she wrote, satirical and sharp, was a piece I first encountered in Harper’s Magazine. (The inception of the piece, how it came alive when she moved away from outrage, is explained in the Narrative Magazine article I have linked above.) Titled “Useful Zulu Phrases,” it was a review of a book popular in South Africa among the White settlers. (Another lovely essay of hers in the magazine is subtitled “My years in the creative-writing gulag.”) I have often shared “Useful Zulu Phrases” with my students and, today, in Lynn’s memory, here below is the xerox of the piece. Lynn’s reading of the phrase-book is full of laughs—the search for life at the very heart of the failure that was apartheid. I wish that Donald Trump, who has been using the word genocide to describe what is happening to Whites in South Africa, also got to read this work.