Author(s): Deborah Levy

Literature | Read our reviews! | Feminism | Biography and Memoir

Taking George Orwell's famous essay, 'Why I Write', as a jumping-off point, Deborah Levy offers her own indispensable reflections of the writing life. With wit, clarity and calm brilliance, she considers how the writer must stake claim to that contested territory and shape it to her need. Itis a work of dazzling insight and deep psychological succour, from one of our most vital contemporary writers.
Living Autobiography - first of three parts.

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THOMAS'S REVIEW:
In 1946 George Orwell wrote an essay ‘Why I Write’, in which he described some events that marked his development towards becoming a writer and outlined what he saw were the four main motives for writing: ‘Sheer egoism’, ‘Aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘Historical impulse’ and ‘Political purpose’. He explained that he would not naturally have become a political writer had circumstances not demanded it. Responding to this essay but contrasting the bluntness of its assertions with a subtler and less direct approach, Deborah Levy, who re-emerged from undeserved obscurity when she was shortlisted for the 2011 Booker Prize for Swimming Home (now shelved beside 1989’s Beautiful Mutants at home), takes Orwell’s four ‘motives’ as titles for pieces of memoir: of her childhood in South Africa (where her father was imprisoned for five years as a member of the ANC); of her teenage years in England, wishing to ‘belong’; and of a time she spent in the off-season at a small mountain hotel in Majorca, despondent, wondering how to deal with things she didn’t want to think about and doubting her ability to get her writing out into the world. As she talks with a Chinese shopkeeper, another displaced character, over dinner, she comes to some resolve: “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”.

{THOMAS}

Review: An up-to-date version of 'A Room of One's Own' . . . I suspect it will be quoted for many years to come * Irish Examiner *
Superb sharpness and originality of imagination. It is feminist and political while being an inspiring work of writing . . . She writes on the high wire, unfalteringly -- Marina Warner
Levy's strength is her originality of thought and expression -- Jeanette Winterson
An exciting writer, sharp and shocking as the knives her characters wield * Sunday Times *
One of the few contemporary British writers comfortable on a world stage * New Statesman *
A writer whose anger and confusion in the face of the world transform into poetic flights of fancy . . . which always feel marvellously right * Independent *

Author Biography: Deborah Levy is the author of several novels including Hot Milk and The Man Who Saw Everything, alongside a formally innovative, critically acclaimed 'living autobiography' trilogy- Things I Don't Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate. She has been shortlisted twice each for the Goldsmiths Prize and Booker Prize and she won the Prix Femina Etranger. She has also written for The Royal Shakespeare Company and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.