‘I believed I didn’t have the right kind of brain for science’

For her new novel, Lost and Wanted, which follows Helen, an eminent theoretical physicist and single mother, as she mourns the death of her closest friend, Freudenberger set out to teach herself as much physics as she could. All three of Freudenberger’s previous works of fiction, Lucky Girls, The Dissident and The Newlyweds, focus on cultures she did not grow up in, and for her, as she worked on Lost and Wanted, physics became “sort of another country”, giving her “that heightened sense of experience that I get from travelling”. ’”

The emotional centre of the novel is grief, and while revising the book, Freudenberger lost a close friend, the composer Michael Friedman, who died unexpectedly in his early 40s and to whom the novel is dedicated.

Source: www.theguardian.com