(Incidentally, although the movie star remains unnamed, two clicks of a mouse will tell you that he was at this time already the father of a young child by someone else – surely a crucial fact which Forrest must have known but, bafflingly, omits to mention.)īy now, though, I no longer knew who to believe or what to think. Or the "movie star with a storied reputation" who spends a year telling her he wants her to have his babies, only to dump her apparently without warning. And the playwright whose "talent looms over anyone our age who wants to be a writer", who asks if she thinks they'll ever sleep together.
There's the on-off flirtation with the "award-winning" writer. Writing screenplays now and moving from New York to Beverly Hills, the opportunities are rife. What are we to make of her constant need to have men – and especially famous men – desire her, and then hurry off to catalogue it all in a tone that's a little too close to crowing for comfort? Maybe it's precisely this self-obsession that lies at the heart of her illness, but it is hard to read on without a bad taste in the mouth. But does she realise this is what she's written? As a portrait of manic self-obsession, Forrest's memoir is frank and acute. But a hundred or so pages on – having now even quizzed his dignified widow over lunch – she is still asking questions like "why, why, why didn't he give me any warning?" This is when I began to lose patience. Though distraught, she seems to grasp the fact that the psychiatrist's death is principally a tragedy for him, his wife and two young children. Unsurprisingly, this death – the shock of it, and the inevitable sense of having been abandoned – looms large for Forrest.
But that's not until she's made a serious suicide attempt, come home and done a spell in the Priory, and spent several more years in damaging relationships, all of it made more disorientating by the fact that Dr R dies suddenly of lung cancer without any of his patients knowing he was ill.
Ultimately, with his help, she turns herself around. Lonely, bulimic and increasingly self-destructive, she binges, purges and cuts herself with razors, while embarking on a series of casual and abusive sexual relationships.įinally, having reached the point where "sex didn't register unless it hurt", she finds herself in a hospital emergency ward and from there manages to get herself to Dr R, a likeably down-to-earth psychiatrist. Many would envy her, so it's perhaps not surprising that for some time she keeps her real life (and self) secret. Indeed, there's a fairytale element to this tale of a bright and attractive 22-year-old from a loving, if eccentric, family who, on contract to the Guardian and with a first novel about to come out, moves to Manhattan to write.
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