Her decision to start afresh at age 50 was costly but worth the price: “Freedom is never free,” she writes. Levy asks questions that evoke Sheila Heti’s semi-fictional novel, “How Should a Person Be?”: “What is a woman for? What should a woman be?” And more pointedly, what does it take for a woman to be the main character in her life?įor starters, it requires liberating yourself from trying “to please everyone all the time in a bid for approval, home, children and love.” Levy picks up her personal history shortly after the painful “shipwreck” of her 20-year marriage, when she moved with her two daughters from the family’s large Victorian home to a shabby rental apartment atop a North London hill. “The Cost of Living” is concerned with not just how to write, but how to live.
In “Things I Don’t Want to Know,” Levy asked, “What do we do with knowledge that we cannot bear to live with?” One answer was to channel it into literature.Īs Orson Welles told us, if we want a happy ending, it depends on where we stop the story. “The Cost of Living,” the second volume of her “working autobiography,” confirms that this is a writer who has found her voice and her subject, and both speak directly to our times. Her literary career, which began in the 1980s writing plays, has blossomed her two most recent novels - “Swimming Home” and “Hot Milk” - were both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Levy’s voice may not be loud, but in the years since her marriage ended, it has become increasingly forthright and clear. “The suburb of femininity is not a good place to live,” Deborah Levy wrote in “Things I Don’t Want to Know” (2014), her shrewd response to George Orwell’s 1946 essay, “Why I Write.” In that first autobiographical manifesto, Levy addressed the challenges of finding her voice in a world “fathered by masculine consciousness.” After tracing her path from her 1960s childhood in South Africa - where she was traumatized by her father’s imprisonment for his anti-apartheid work in the African National Congress - to her family’s exile in England, she commented: “to become a writer, I had to learn to interrupt, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then louder, and then to just speak in my own voice which is not loud at all.”
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