Lynn Ruth Freed

The writer Lynn Freed, celebrated for her mordant and keenly observed novels, short stories, and essays, died of lymphoma at the age of 79 at her home in Sonoma, CA on May 9, 2025. Lynn Ruth Freed was born on July 18, 1945 in Durban, South Africa, the third and youngest daughter of Anne (Moshal) and Harold Derrick Freed.

She captured in fiction and memoir her elegant father, her fiercely ambitious mother, and their theatre company and exuberant household in Durban in the 1950s and 1960s. "The real world of my childhood," she wrote, "a large subtropical port on the Indian Ocean, with beaches and bush and sugarcane and steaming heat, a strict Anglican girls' school, massive family gatherings on Friday nights and Jewish holidays, and then my parents' theatre world...-this world did not exist, not even peripherally, in the literature available to me." The texture of home, the longing to leave and the yearning for the world left behind, and the fraught relationship between the writer and those who fed her imagination were among the subjects she explored with exquisite honesty and a finely tuned voice.

Lynn Freed was the author of seven novels: her first, Heart Change (1982; republished as Friends of the Family in 2000), described by the Oakland Tribune as an "anti-romance in romance clothing," was followed by the acclaimed Home Ground (1986), The Bungalow (1993), The Mirror (1997), House of Women (2002), The Servants' Quarters (2009), and The Last Laugh (2019). She published a collection of stories, The Curse of the Appropriate Man, in 2004, and two volumes of essays: Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home (2005) and The Romance of Elsewhere (2017). In 2002, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded Freed the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award in fiction. She received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Guggenheim Foundation among others, and residencies at the Bellagio Center, the Bogliasco Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo (where much of Home Ground was written), among others. Anne Lamott has described her as "a beautiful writer, dead-on brilliant, rich in humor, possessing a dark and comforting wisdom."

Freed first came to the United States as a high school exchange student with the American Field Service. After receiving a B.A. from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, she returned to the U.S. in 1967 as a graduate student in English literature at Columbia University, where she earned her PhD. She moved to San Francisco in 1970 and lived in Sonoma from 1989 until her death. An exacting and revered teacher of literature and creative writing, she was Professor Emerita of English at the University of California, Davis, where she taught for fifteen years. She was also a member of the core faculty of the MFA program at Bennington College and a frequent faculty member at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont.

Lynn Freed is survived by her daughter, Jessica Gamsu, and her granddaughter, Georgia Anne Donde, of Cape Town, South Africa. Her first marriage, to Gordon Gamsu, ended in divorce. She was married to Robert Kerwin until his death in 2021 and is also survived by Robert's son Kilian Kerwin, his daughter Fiona Zecca, and their children. Her family also include her nieces Tamara Cohen, Susan Nathanson and Deborah Tannenbaum, and her nephews David Zulman, Richard Zulman and Jonathan Zulman.