![]() The two-storey building was then a single floor that used to be called Nava Jeevan, a home run by The Indian Society For Sponsorship and Adoption. Saroo is talking about a time when he stayed in that house for a couple of months in 1987. "There used to be a big pond here," he says, pointing to a row of houses a few feet away from the building. Getting off the car on a sunny Sunday, he walks towards a two-storey building in a corner of a bylane on Thakurpukur Road. Very occasionally, I’ve a clear idea of the form the story will take, but, in most cases, I’ve been surprised by what I find inside myself,” she says.Feb. I do many drafts as I find my way into the story. “I don’t have a vision to stay true to - just a few tantalising glimpses that lure me on. Why have a small part in a play, when I could be the creator of every part in a book?” she says.įreud writes every morning, working her way through drafts, till she arrives at the heart of the novel. Slowly, writing took over from acting, and by the time I’d written my second book, I knew I’d never go back. “While I was working as an actress, I started writing, just for my own pleasure, and found that it was then I was at my happiest. ![]() In 1981, she met Kitty Aldridge at the Drama Centre in London, and the two went on to write their own show titled The Norfolk Broads that did rather well in its time. From when she was 16 till she turned 20, Freud attended acting schools in London. “I was looking for something to do with my life right from the start and aged about 12, I hit upon acting,” she says. Rather early in life, Freud knew she wanted to be more, without quite knowing what. As I have grown more confident as a writer I have needed this less, and the links have become more tenuous, but they are still important,” she says. Sometimes, I have an idea for a story and it takes me some time to uncover how I can link myself to it. “I feel I need to own the story in some way. Her great grand-father, the neurologist and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, would have probably found it of interest that there’s always a bit of Freud in her works, but the writer dismisses it as nothing beyond authorial appropriation. It’s important that it sounds believable,” she says. Freud’s own use of language is cadenced, rich in its simplicity. She tended to read big sagas and I loved to hear her reading,” she says. “I was slow to learn to read, but my mother always read to us every night. It was Coverley who introduced her to books. “My father’s work ethic was incredible, while my mother lived her life in a very creative way, making her homes and her gardens beautiful, travelling, dancing, reading,” she says. Freud spent hours watching her father paint and then later, sitting for him. In this peripatetic life, there were only two constants - art and literature. “My father’s Jewish, my mother Irish and they both sort of had to make new lives for themselves and there’s a toughness that comes from that, there’s a kind of grit about starting again, recreating yourself,” she says. Coverley, who had had both her daughters before she turned 20 chose to make a life for herself and her daughters on her own. Freud’s parents separated soon after her birth, even though they remained friends. Her grandfather, the renowned architect Ernst Freud had moved to England in 1933 with his family to avoid Nazi persecution. As the younger daughter of Jewish painter Lucian Freud, one of Britain’s foremost artists of all time, and the bohemian Bernadine Coverley, whom he immortalised in the portrait titled Pregnant Girl (set to go under the hammer at Sotheby’s contemporary art evening auction in London on February 10), Freud’s unconventional childhood had never been short of stories. On a sun-soaked afternoon at the recently-concluded Zee Jaipur Literature Festival, seated on the press terrace, Freud spoke about how she found her way into writing. It was a useful background for a writer as it turned out, and has given me a lot of material,” says Freud, 52, author of novels such as Hideous Kinky (1992), The Sea House (2003), Lucky Break (2010) and last year’s standout novel, Mr Mac and Me. “In order to make sense of the many changes and upheavals, I was always making up stories. It stoked her curiosity about the glorious, uncertain universe she found herself in, a world which never allowed her to be still. The landscape changed often - from the placidity of the British countryside in Sussex to the rainsoaked shores of Ireland and the souks of Marrakesh in Morocco, where she found herself with her mother and sister when she was four and where she lived for the next 18 months. Home was an endless journey from one rented apartment to the next, from one new adventure onto the next great unknown. A rich autobiographical thread runs through Esther Freud’s novels.įor a very long time in her childhood, the ground beneath Esther Freud’s feet was never still.
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