Freedom (Franzen novel)  Freedom is a 2010 novel by American author Jonathan Franzen. It was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. "Freedom" received general acclaim from book critics, and was ranked one of the best books of 2010 by several publications, and has been described as a "Great American Novel". The novel follows the lives of the Berglund family, particularly the parents Patty and Walter, as their lives develop and then their happiness falls apart. Important to their story is a college friend of Walter's and successful rock musician, Richard Katz, who has a love affair with Patty. Walter and Patty's son, Joey, also goes through his own coming of age challenges. Franzen began working on the novel in 2001, following his successful novel "The Corrections". The title of the novel was an artifact of his book proposal, where he wanted to write a novel that freed him from the constraints of his previous work. The cover of many editions of the novel includes a cerulean warbler, a songbird, for which Walter works to create an environmental preserve. The novel opens with a brief look at the Berglund family during their time living in St. Paul, Minnesota, from the perspective of their nosy neighbors. The Berglunds are portrayed as an ideal liberal and middle-class family, and they are among the first families to move into urban St. Paul after years of white flight to the suburbs. Patty Berglund is a charming and youthful homemaker with a self-deprecating sense of humor; her husband Walter is a mild-mannered but principled lawyer with environmentalist advocacies. They have one daughter, Jessica, and one son, Joey, the latter exhibiting a precocious independence and talent for making money. Joey becomes sexually involved with a neighborhood teen named Connie Monaghan and begins to rebel against his mother, going so far as to move in with Connie and her family, making Patty and Walter increasingly unstable. After many unhappy years, and after both Joey and Jessica have gone off to college, Patty and Walter relocate to Washington, D.C., abandoning the neighborhood and house they have worked so hard to improve. The second section of the novel is a story-within-a-story, presented as an autobiography written by Patty at her therapist's suggestion. She recalls her youth as a star basketball player, her alienation from her busy Democrat parents and artistically-inclined siblings, and her being date-raped. Instead of attending an East Coast elite college like her siblings, she obtains a varsity scholarship to the University of Minnesota, where she continues her successful basketball career.