Hideous Kinky

Esther Freud was five years old when her mother took her and her seven-year-old sister from London to Marrakech in the early 1970s, joining the trail of young Westerners drawn to Morocco by the promise of cheap living, Sufi mysticism, and escape from northern European domesticity. Hideous Kinky (1992), her debut novel, is an autobiographical account of this childhood year told entirely from the five-year-old’s point of view.

The present-tense narration from a child narrator is a technical decision that pays off completely. The unnamed narrator understands almost nothing of what is actually happening — her mother’s spiritual seeking, the economics of their precarious existence, the adult dramas happening around her — but she perceives everything. The Marrakech she renders is a place of specific sensory data: the smell of the souk, the quality of light in the medina, the texture of the classroom in a local Moroccan school, the particular drama of a snake charmer in Djemaa el-Fna. It is one of the most vivid portraits of Marrakech available in fiction precisely because it is not filtered through adult interpretation.

The title comes from a game the two sisters play, chanting nonsense words — “hideous kinky, hideous kinky” — as a rhythm of comfort in an incomprehensible adult world. The comedy of partial understanding is the novel’s dominant register: the children navigating what their mother tells them and what they observe, fitting pieces together imperfectly and moving on.

The 1998 film adaptation starred Kate Winslet as the mother. It is a warm and competent film, but the novel’s peculiar quality — the complete absence of adult explanatory distance — is impossible to reproduce in conventional cinema.

Reading Guides

• Esther Freud Books in Order
• Where to Start with Esther Freud
• Books About Morocco: Essential Reading for Visitors to the Maghreb
• Books Like A Year in Provence: Expat Life, Food, and Life Abroad

A Famous Family, A Particular Childhood

Esther Freud belongs to one of the most remarkable families in modern British culture. She is the great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, and the daughter of Lucian Freud, the painter widely regarded as one of the greatest figurative artists of the twentieth century. Hideous Kinky draws not on that public lineage, however, but on a far more private and unconventional childhood: the year her mother took her and her sister to Morocco in the early 1970s, in flight from northern European domesticity and in pursuit of Sufi mysticism. The autobiographical foundation gives the novel its authority — this is a remembered world, not an invented one — while the child’s-eye narration keeps the famous family entirely offstage.

The Discipline of the Child’s View

The technical achievement of Hideous Kinky lies in Freud’s absolute commitment to the perspective of a five-year-old. The narrator perceives everything and understands almost nothing — her mother’s spiritual seeking, the precariousness of their finances, the adult dramas unfolding around her all reach the reader only through the partial, literal comprehension of a small child. This discipline produces both the novel’s comedy and its peculiar truthfulness: Marrakech arrives as pure sensory data, the smell of the souk and the light in the medina and the texture of a Moroccan classroom, unmediated by adult interpretation. It is one of the most vivid portraits of the city in fiction precisely because nothing in it is explained.

The Hippie Trail and Its Afterlife

The novel quietly documents a specific cultural moment: the early-1970s migration of young Westerners to Morocco along the so-called hippie trail, drawn by cheap living, spiritual experiment, and deliberate displacement from the lives they had been raised to expect. Freud neither celebrates nor condemns this world; she simply renders it as her child-narrator experienced it, with its instability and its wonder held in the same level gaze. The 1998 film adaptation, with Kate Winslet as the mother, brought the story to a wider audience and is warm and competent in its own right, but it necessarily supplies the adult explanatory distance the novel so rigorously withholds — which is exactly what makes the book irreplaceable.

A Remarkable Debut

Hideous Kinky announced Esther Freud as a distinctive new voice in British fiction, and it remains the book by which she is most widely known. Its virtues are those of compression and restraint: at little over two hundred pages it contains no padding, and its refusal to explain — to supply the adult context, the political background, the psychological accounting that a more conventional memoir-novel would provide — is precisely the source of its power. The mother at its centre remains a figure of mystery, glimpsed only through the uncomprehending love of her small daughter, and readers who want her fully explained will not find it here. But that withholding is the point. The novel trusts the reader to feel a childhood from the inside, to absorb Marrakech as the child absorbed it, before any of it could be understood. Luminous, funny, and strange, it is a small masterpiece of perspective, and one of the freshest first novels in recent British literature.

Place Felt Before Understood

The governing principle of Hideous Kinky is that children absorb place without theory — that the Morocco of the novel is felt long before it could be understood. The narrator has no framework for the spiritual seeking that has brought her family to Marrakech, no grasp of the economics of their precarious existence, no sense of the historical moment she is living through. What she has instead is total sensory openness: she registers the colours, smells, and sounds of the medina, the daily rhythm of a domestic Marrakech that tourist visits never penetrate, the specific drama of the snake charmer in Djemaa el-Fna. Freud’s wager is that this unmediated perception yields a truer portrait of the city than any amount of adult analysis, and the wager pays off completely. The result is a Marrakech rendered with a freshness that explanation could only have dulled.