Superficially speaking, there is nothing about the writer Emma Forrest that would make the words “mania” or “self-mutilation” spring to mind.
Here she sits, a small, soft-spoken woman with a mass of corkscrew curls worthy of her name, picking sultanas from her salad in a Notting Hill lunch spot and telling me calmly about the many years she spent cutting, binging, purging, hallucinating and obsessing about (when not actually attempting) suicide.
“I wrote the book to stay afloat,” she says of her just-published memoir Your Voice in My Head, which comes out in Canada this week. “I said okay I’ll write this and I’ll publish this and by the time it gets published I’ll be out of it and I’ll be all right.”
And she is. More or less.
Does this sound too much like any one of a recent avalanche of youthful misery-memoirs? It would, except for Forrest’s inarguable cachet both as a much praised writer and simultaneously, a Hollywood gossip-site It Girl. The British-born, Los Angeles-based novelist and screenwriter who was named one of Variety’s 2009 “top-10 screenwriters to watch” is very much in the public eye these days as she promotes her new book. But that doesn’t mean it’s a subject Forrest is entirely comfortable with. “One psychologically dangerous terrain for relapses is talking about it,” she says, smiling, “and now I have to talk about it for a year.”
Emma Forrest with her former A-list boyfriend Colin Farrell
Forrest, who was diagnosed with Bipolar 1 (considered the most severe form of manic depression) – “the same diagnosis as Carrie Fisher!” she points out brightly – has accepted the fact she may always need to take mood-stabilizing drugs. But it wasn’t the meds that saved her life. It was a Manhattan talk therapist “Dr. R” whose optimism and insight allowed her to heal – and eventually embark on a screenwriting career in Hollywood and a love affair with a major movie star that would break her heart all over again.
Sounds crazy, right? Welcome to the wonderland of Emma Forrest – a place where things just get curiouser and curiouser.
Forrest, 33, has already managed to compile an impressive body of work when not self-destructing. After dropping out of her West London high school, she become a music critic for the Sunday Times at the tender age of 15. She’s also the author of three critically acclaimed novels – Namedropper, Thin Skin and Cherries in the Snow. At 22, she moved to New York, and later to Los Angeles, where she currently resides. Since then, she’s established a solid career as a screenwriter, selling several as-yet-unproduced scripts to the likes of Scott Rudin and Brad Pitt, and doing gun-for-hire rewrites on big studio productions.
But none of this, to Forrest’s annoyance, is what she’s best known for. If you Google her, you will find dozens of photos of Colin Farrell. That’s because she had a year-long affair with the actor, which was pored over and pilloried by the British press. Still, do not assume the famous actor in the book (whom Forrest calls “GH,” short for “gypsy husband”) is the man you may have seen her with in the tabs.
“He’s on my public record, and so any lovers that I write about from here on in – I could write about my 16-year-old African female lover, not that I’ve had one – people will say, ‘That’s obviously Colin Farrell.’ ”
But there are some clear parallels in this case. For starters, the rather glaring fact that the man in her book is an A-list movie star! At this, Forrest sighs. Then she leans in.
“The truth is I have had, for whatever reason, several movie-star boyfriends,” she sits back. “It’s just that Colin’s the only one I got caught with.”
I’m flabbergasted. Several movie-star boyfriends? When does this woman find the time?
