Things I Don't Want to Know: Living Autobiography 1

(Paperback)

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Description

First instalment of Levy's essential 'living autobiography' trilogy - reissued to match the beautiful COST OF LIVING hardback 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. It is a work of dazzling insight and deep psychological succour, from one of our most vital contemporary writers. This first volume of the trilogy focuses on the writer as a young woman - the confusion and turbulence of youth, and the uncertainties of carving an identity as a writer. The second volume, The Cost of Living, speaks to the challenges of middle age as a writer and a woman - motherhood, separation, bereavement.

Reviews

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 Bio

Deborah Levy is the author of seven novels- Beautiful Mutants, Swallowing Geography, The Unloved, Billy and Girl, Swimming Home, Hot Milk and The Man Who Saw Everything. She has been shortlisted twice each for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Man Booker Prize. Her short story collection, Black Vodka, was nominated for the International Frank O'Connor Short Story Award and was broadcast on BBC Radio 4, as were her acclaimed dramatizations of Freud's iconic case studies, Dora and The Wolfman. She has also written for The Royal Shakespeare Company and her pioneering theatre writing is collected in Levy- Plays 1. Her work is widely translated. Deborah Levy is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is also the author of a formally innovative and emotionally daring trilogy of memoirs, a living autobiography on writing, gender politics and philosophy. The first two volumes, Things I Don't Want to Know and The Cost of Living, won the Prix Femina Etranger 2020. The final volume, Real Estate, will be published in Spring 2021.