Things I Don't Want to Know: On Writing

Things I Don't Want to Know: On Writing by Levy, Deborah. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9781620405659.

To be published simultaneously with Black Vodka, the Man Booker Prize–shortlisted writers new collection of short stories, a shimmering jewel of a book about writing. Blending personal history, gender politics, philosophy, and literary theory into a luminescent treatise on writing, love, and loss, Things I Dont Want to Know is Deborah Levys witty response to George Orwells 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 Levys newest work riffs on these same commitments from a female writers 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 familys 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 Europes 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 author at seven, fifteen, and fifty), Things I Dont Want to Know brings the reader into a writers heart.