The Cost of Living - Deborah Levy

November 2019

My favorite writer at the moment. Something about Levy’s writing is brutal, maybe it’s sparseness and honesty. I read an interview with Sally Rooney where she said something like, if you’re really careful as a writer, you can write what you actually think. Levy seems much less careful in both her autobiographical work (like this one) and in her novels. She says it better than I can:

“It was calm and silent and dark in my shed. I had let go of the life I had planned and was probably out of my depth every day. It’s hard to write and be open and let things in when life is tough, but to keep everything out means there’s nothing to work with.”

“We are told from an early age that it is a good thing to be able to express ourselves, but there is as much invested in putting a stop to language as there is in finding it. Truth is not always the most entertaining guest at the dinner table, and anyway, as Duras suggests, we are always more unreal to ourselves than other people are.”

Excited to get into the rest of her stuff.