Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiography trilogy, Things I Don’t Want to Know; The Cost of Living; and Real Estate, is a poetic meditation on womanhood, writing, and self-reinvention through the decades.

The first volume, Things I Don’t Want to Know, zooms in on Levy’s early life as a young woman and a budding writer. It’s a beautifully layered response to George Orwell’s classic essay Why I Write, but told through the lens of a woman coming to terms with her voice and identity. Levy brings to light the confusion, turbulence, and quiet resistance of youth. She challenged Orwell, not to dismiss him, but to insert the often-overlooked female experience into the conversation. If you’re a woman who writes, or simply someone interested in feminist perspectives, this book is a must-read.

Then comes The Cost of Living, which turned out to be my favorite of the three. There’s a raw, emotional force running through this book that I deeply connected with. Here, Levy writes from the vantage point of her early fifties. She’s navigating the aftermath of a divorce, moving out of the family home, raising two teenagers, dealing with the loss of her mother, and still trying to hold on to her work and sense of self. Levy’s reflections offer a comforting reminder that chaos doesn’t always mean disaster. Sometimes, it’s the start of something new. Her writing captures that in-between space, where you’re either becoming more of who you are or finally breaking free of who you were told to be. Or maybe, as she suggests, both at the same time.

Finally, Real Estate brings the reader into the phase of a woman approaching sixty, living alone, and asking what comes next. There’s a humor in her yearning for an imaginary dream house in the Mediterranean, a house complete with an oval fireplace shaped like an ostrich egg and a pomegranate tree in the garden. It’s comical, yet deeply symbolic of her search for a space that’s truly her own. This book explores aging, friendship, creativity, motherhood, and the desire for freedom, both physical and emotional. It’s a kind of manifesto, too, one that encourages us to build a life we believe in, rather than one handed to us by default. Levy doesn’t sugarcoat the loneliness or the doubts, but she leans into life with honesty and determination.

Of all three, The Cost of Living left the biggest impact on me. I felt the strongest emotion in its pages: grief, resilience, and the quiet courage it takes to begin again.

My Favorite Bits

Things I Dont Want to Know

• Perhaps when Orwell described sheer egoism as a necessary quality for a writer, he was not thinking about the sheer egoism of a female writer. Even the most arrogant female writer has to work overtime to build an ego that is robust enough to get her through January, never mind all the way to December.

• Writing made me feel wiser than I actually was. Wise and sad. That was what I thought writers should be. I was sad anyway, much sadder than the sentences I wrote. I was a sad girl impersonating a sad girl.

• We were on the run from the lies concealed in the language of politics, from myths about our character and our purpose in life. We were on the run from our own desires too probably, whatever they were.

• What do we do with the knowledge that we cannot bear to live with? What do we do with the things we do not want to know?

• A female writer cannot afford to feel her life too clearly. If she does, she will write in a rage when she should write calmly.

She will write in a rage when she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)

The Cost of Living

• As Orson Wells told us, if we want a happy ending, it depends on where we stop the story.

• Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realize we don’t want to hold it together.

• I did not wish to restore the past. What I needed was an entirely new composition.

• Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs.

• Words have to open the mind. When words close the mind, we can be sure that someone has been reduced to nothingness.

• At this uncertain time, writing was one of the few activities in which I could handle the anxiety of uncertainty, of not knowing what was going to happen next.

• The appeal of writing, as I understood, it was an invitation to climb in-between the apparent reality of things, to see not only the tree but the insects that live in its infrastructure, to discover that everything is connected in the ecology of language and living.

• .. The things we don’t want to know are the things that are known to us anyway, but we don not wish to look at them too closely. Fredy described this wish to unknown what we know as motivated forgetting.

• All writing is about looking and listening and paying attention to the world.

• Sometimes we want to unbelong as much as we want to belong.

• To become the person someone else had imagined for us is not freedom – it is to mortgage our life to someone else’s fear.

• If we cannot at least imagine we are free, we are living a life that is wrong for us.

• When a woman has to find a new way of living and breaks from the societal story that has erased her name, she is expected to be viciously self-hating, crazed with suffering, tearful with remorse. These are the jewels reserved for her in the patriarchy’s crown, always there for the taking.

Real Estate

• Some people feel crazy when they try to deal with two contradictory thoughts at the same time, as if they fear they have done something wrong and need to purge the intruding thought before it muddies the water. The point of thinking is that it will always muddy the water. So how do we live with our free thoughts and the mud?

• Perhaps we could see that we were not that similar to each other, we were different, we did not have to be the same. This made us less judgemental, we could find enjoyment and inspiration in each other’s company, and obviously we infuriated each other as well.

• .. you never know what a woman really wants because she’s always being told what she wants.

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Things I Don’t Want to Know

Publication Date: 1 January 2013
Number of pages: 109 pages

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The Cost of Living

Publication Date: 5 April 2018
Number of pages: 144 pages

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Real Estate

Publication Date: 13 May 2021
Number of pages: 297 pages

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