Supplied
- Title: Real Estate
- Author: Deborah Levy
- Genre: Memoir
- Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
- Pages: 297
Critic’s Pick
The antepenultimate chapter of Deborah Levy’s new memoir begins with a work of fiction, The 18th. Levy wrote the short story for a collection about living in Paris; she had been staying in the 18th Arrondissement. It’s a very good story, but that is not the point. The reader, who has been with Levy at this point for 11 previous chapters (in addition to two previous memoirs), will recognize many details in this story. Even if The 18th is made-up, Levy has borrowed from her own life to create a work of fiction. It is an amazing insight into her process – and it is a reflection of what Levy has been doing with this series of memoirs: using pieces of her life to illustrate the story of her life.
Real Estate is the third – and final, she has said – Instalment in Levy’s Living Autobiography series. I had devoured the previous books and anticipated the third the way one craves a new season of a beloved TV show – or, perhaps a more apt analogy, a reunion with a friend who lives far away.
In the first of the trilogy, Things I Don’t Want to Know, things are not going well at home in London, and Levy takes off to Spain to write in a hotel room, alone. In this book, published in 2013, we learn about her childhood in South Africa, where her (white) father, a member of the banned African National Congress, is sent to prison for his activism.
In The Cost of Living, published in 2018, her marriage has ended, the house has been sold and Levy establishes a new home for herself and her two daughters in a crumbling apartment block on a hill, as she calls it. She also sets up a writing shed in a friend’s backyard – a room of one’s own.
I read these books shortly after I had abandoned Karl Ove Knausgaard’s multi-volume autofiction series, four books in. While the books are terrific and Knausgaard’s craft is undeniable, I had had enough with his struggle. Reading Levy, I thought of her as the anti-Knausgaard: Whereas the Scandinavian man writes his books with exhaustive detail, Levy’s books tell as big a story, but with great economy. They are slim volumes packed with insight and eloquence – illuminating the female experience in a patriarchal world.
“The way we laugh. At our own desires. The way we mock ourselves. Before anyone else can. The way we are wired to kill. Ourselves. It doesn’t bear thinking about,” she writes in Things I Don’t Want to Know.
“It is so hard to claim our desires and so much more relaxing to mock them,” she writes in The Cost of Living.
Also from The Cost of Living: “Yes, it is sometimes agonizing to feel things. I had spent the last few months trying not to feel anything at all.”
If you don’t want to feel anything at all, look elsewhere. Real Estate, published in late May, is another feel-inducing masterwork.
Facing an empty nest as her younger daughter prepares to go to university, Levy – still living in the apartment in the crumbling apartment block, now home to a banana tree – allows herself to fantasize not about a room of her own this time, but a house. A grand old house with a pomegranate tree in the yard – maybe on the Mediterranean, maybe with a river at the end of the garden and a small rowboat.
Then, a new home of a different sort presents itself: Levy is invited to Paris for a fellowship at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, to begin just as her daughter leaves home. It is not the house with the pomegranate tree; it is a nearly empty apartment. It is also an opportunity, a gift.
It is a new chapter in her life that she learns to embrace – she has loved her life with her daughters; now she can explore her life as an artist.
Toward the end of the book, Levy – back in London from her fellowship, now an internationally recognized and lauded novelist and memoirist – crashes a literary party. There, she runs into another author of some note, a man, whom she does not identify. This man, fuelled by gin cocktails, asks her straight away: “Do you sometimes look in the mirror and think all this success came rather late in the day and so much exposure is rather vulgar, a total bore and awfully fatiguing?”
Levy, in that horrible moment, thinks about her daughters and their young, clever female friends. “What I hoped for them was they would not get to sixty and have to endure being merrily mocked for their skills and talents.”
Why should we mock ourselves when we have so many others to do it for us?
I read these memoirs the way many other women do, I’m sure – as windows into our own lives. Levy, who turns 60 in this book, is a few years ahead of me in these life milestones. I, too, will be an empty nester; I, too, will face that panicked question: What now? And, even more panicked – what’s next after that? The inevitable.
What Levy has taught me is that this stage of life – let’s call it late midlife – does not need to be just about endings. It is also a beginning and it is exciting. A blank canvas that isn’t exactly blank, that has been built up on everything behind it. Women who spend their whole lives putting everyone else first, creating a home for others, now have the freedom to put themselves first. To create something else.
As Levy writes in Real Estate, “you never know what a woman really wants because she’s always being told what she wants.”
Levy has other things to tell us. With these memoirs, she has shown us a different approach to life. This is a thing I do want to know.
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