Guest Episode: Emma Forrest, How to Make a Home That Heals After Life Changes
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My guest is the remarkable writer Emma Forrest, a novelist, memoirist and filmmaker whose work is known for its emotional honesty and piercing insight into the complexities of love, identity and the stories we inherit from our past.
Emma began her career extraordinarily young. At just fifteen she was already writing for the London Evening Standard, and soon after left school to write a “Generation X” column for The Sunday Times, interviewing musicians and documenting youth culture in the 1990s. Emma has written a number of novels including Namedropper, Thin Skin, Cherries in the Snow, Royals, and most recently Father Figure. Her memoir Your Voice in My Head became a hugely influential work about grief, therapy and survival, while her later memoir Busy Being Free explores divorce, independence and rebuilding a life on your own terms.
Following divorce and a major life shift from Los Angeles back to London, Emma reflects on starting again, and what it’s meant to create a home from scratch.
She's also one of those annoyingly brilliant people who can hold forth on just about any subject for hours, and make it genuinely gripping. From serious topics like mental illness, to the most intricate and impassioned musings from the career of Cher to the life of George Michael, to finding creative energy on the top deck of a London bus, all delivered with the same intensity, warmth and humour.
In this episode, we explore what home really is, not just the physical space, but the emotional architecture behind it. We talk about our shared childhood experiences of being othered, and how our childhood homes, loss, and movement across countries shape our sense of belonging.
Emma shares how living in what felt like the “wrong” house for her, a new build devoid of history and texture, deeply impacted her mental health, and why she feels most at ease in spaces that carry stories. A quiet testament to just how profoundly our surroundings shape us.
We also talk about Emma’s deep connection to light and views, and why she will always choose a top-floor, for openness, safety-and epic views.
Emma’s flat is colourful and cosy, and has been intentionally designed to feel safe and cocooning.
The metal staicase up to Emma’s office was designed to be practical, but also safe and beautuful.
The mix of colours and vintage furniture make this home a cosy haven.
Artwork by friends and posters of Emma’s work add a sense of eclecticism.
As someone who loves entertaining and having designed my home for that purpose, it was very interesting chatting to Emma about the reasons and need for creating a home for cocooning - a reminder that your home doesn’t have to perform for anyone else, but can simply just function for you alone, and hold you and yours.
Towards the end of the episode, Emma shares something quite extraordinary, a deeply personal experience of mentally revisiting her childhood home, moving through it room by room, drawer by drawer, a moment that reminds us that the right home never truly leaves us. Closure doesn’t always arrive when we expect it to, and that sometimes we need to return, even if only in memory.
It leaves us with a simple truth, that a well-lived home, much like a well-lived life, is never perfect, it is layered, shaped by change, and sometimes chaos, and filled with traces of everything that came before.This is one of my favourite episodes so far, and I hope it will resonate deeply with anyone drawn to the emotional side of making a home. And the ways identity, belonging, and personal history shape the spaces we can create to make a home that help to heal us after life throws us a curveball.
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