Freudian slippage

A kind-of sequel to Hideous Kinky where the author again fictionalises her life.

- JOSIE SHAPIRO

British novelist Esther Freud, daughter of the painter Lucian Freud and great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, has had plenty of compelling life experience to draw on for her work.

Nonetheless, she has never written a memoir, because she isn't, she's been quoted as saying, “interested in telling the truth”, she's more interested in “weaving a story out of something that has truth behind it”. Freud's latest novel, My Sisters and Other Lovers, isn't autofiction exactly, it's something less defined: it's a story inspired by both true and imagined events.

Freud’s debut novel, Hideous Kinky, was written with the same quasi-confessional impulse, the story being a retelling of her childhood, as Lucy, travelling in Morocco with her mother Bernadine and sister Bella — Julia and Bea in the novel. Hideous Kinky was made into a movie starring Kate Winslet, fresh from her star turn in Titanic.