Things I Don't Want to Know: On Writing

✍ Scribed by Deborah Levy

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 88
• Edition: Reprint
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

A shimmering jewel of a book about writing from two-time Booker Prize finalist Deborah Levy, to publish alongside her new work of nonfiction, The Cost of Living.

Blending personal history, gender politics, philosophy, and literary theory into a luminescent treatise on writing, love, and loss, Things I Don't Want to Know is Deborah Levy's witty response to George Orwell's influential essay "Why I Write." Orwell identified four reasons he was driven to hammer at his typewriter--political purpose, historical impulse, sheer egoism, and aesthetic enthusiasm--and Levy's newest work riffs on these same commitments from a female writer's perspective.

As she struggles to balance womanhood, motherhood, and her writing career, Levy identifies some of the real-life experiences that have shaped her novels, including her family's emigration from South Africa in the era of apartheid; her teenage years in the UK where she played at being a writer in the company of builders and bus drivers in cheap diners; and her theater-writing days touring Poland in the midst of Eastern Europe's economic crisis, where she observed how a soldier tenderly kissed the women in his life goodbye.

Spanning continents (Africa and Europe) and decades (we meet the writer at seven, fifteen, and fifty), Things I Don't Want to Know brings the reader into a writer's heart.

✦ Table of Contents

Title Page
Epigraphs
Contents
1 Political Purpose
2 Historical Impulse
3 Sheer Egoism
4 Aesthetic Enthusiasm
Deborah Levy’s note
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright Page