In the 2022 song “Anything but Me,” MUNA, a pop group known for sweet, close harmonies and an aesthetic of “queer joy,” sings, “You’re gonna say that I’m on a high horse / I think that my horse is regular-sized / Did you ever think maybe / You’re on a pony / Going in circles on a carousel ride?” Beware the woman on her high horse: like the animal she steers, she is extravagant, willful, disobedient. She takes her grandiosity seriously, even if “high” is a subjective word, even if any horse might appear too high with a woman on its back. Ask the British author Deborah Levy, who considers the idiom in “Real Estate” (2021), her third “living autobiography.” The book, which Levy wrote after getting divorced in her fifties, chronicles her attempts to unlearn the lessons she absorbed during her marriage—namely, that she should subordinate her life to caregiving and housework. In an anthemic passage, she envisions the kind of woman into whom she is trying to transform herself:
“Real Estate” and Levy’s two earlier living autobiographies, “Things I Don’t Want to Know” (2014) and “The Cost of Living” (2018), are bound together by her search for this figure, the elusive “major female character” or “missing female character”—a woman who would be the hero of her own life. (In “Real Estate,” Levy further complicates this quest by looking for the older female protagonist.) Levy has been writing fiction, plays, poetry, and essays since the early eighties, and has twice been short-listed for the Booker Prize, for the novels “Swimming Home” and “Hot Milk.” But the three living autobiographies, named for their elliptical quality, the way they drift backward and forward in time, may be her best-loved works. A pleasing paradox of Levy’s career is that new generations have received her rejection of maternal martyrdom as a gesture of care. The books have connected her to an audience of women grateful for the mentorship and encouragement in their pages; a recent Guardian profile describes readers coming to Levy’s events for life advice, as if travelling to Canterbury.
In “Things I Don’t Want to Know,” which Levy wrote in her late forties and early fifties, she excavates her childhood in apartheid South Africa, her early years as a playwright, and the beginnings of her marriage. “The Cost of Living” and “Real Estate” cover her divorce and subsequent self-reinvention. Levy travels across Europe; she covets imaginary mansions with fountains and pomegranate trees; she throws elaborate dinner parties with her daughters.
The books have their manifesto-like moments. “To strip the wallpaper off the fairy tale of the Family House in which the comfort and happiness of men and children have been the priority is to find behind it an unthanked, unloved, neglected, exhausted woman,” Levy writes in “The Cost of Living.” But much of their appeal flows from Levy’s honesty about her own ambivalence and uncertainty. Her account of becoming free—filling her days with art and work, thinking through solitude, battling loneliness—refuses triumphalism. “I was unmaking the home that I’d spent much of my life’s energy creating,” she writes. “My new life was all about fumbling for keys in the dark.”
In her fiction, too, Levy evokes characters who are unrealized or in transition. “Swimming Home” features a Polish émigré turned cosmopolitan poet. The historian in “The Man Who Saw Everything” can’t put the events of his life in the right order. “August Blue,” Levy’s eighth and newest novel, extends this project. When the book opens, the main character, Elsa, a concert pianist, is in crisis. She keeps catching glimpses of a woman whom she believes in some enigmatic way to be her double. She has just sabotaged a performance at a concert in Vienna: instead of Rachmaninoff’s second concerto, her fingers, as if possessed, began to tap out an alien composition. Elsa’s own origins are equally mysterious to her. Her birth parents gave her up when she was very young to a neighboring family. Later, she was adopted by the renowned maestro Arthur Goldstein. The novel is shaped by Elsa’s longing for her birth mother and her struggle to make peace with women who turn away from their children, as Elsa’s mom did, and toward themselves, as Elsa herself must. The book unspools, in spare, charged vignettes, as a kind of pilgrim’s progress, with Elsa moving closer to her doppelgänger, the buried truth of her parentage, and her own artistic voice.
The novel, like much of Levy’s fiction, takes place in a world that feels at once familiar and permeated with tones and shapes from its protagonist’s unconscious. Obscurely symbolic horses dance and stamp; the double seems somehow to have accessed Elsa’s earliest memories. Elsa is searching for what the typical Levy heroine seeks—a blueprint for becoming the major female character—and her desire pushes her to strange and poetic acts of self-repossession. She uses her hands, insured for millions of dollars, to pull sea urchins from the ocean. Declaring independence from nature itself, she dyes her hair blue.
When I spoke to Levy, who is sixty-three, over Zoom, she had recently concluded her U.K. book tour. She appeared at her desk, in front of a wide-open window, clad in a wavy blouse that matched her plummy lip gloss. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How are you doing?
It’s a sunny day in Paris. It’s been raining endlessly, as if there were no other weather here. But now it’s warm and the sky is blue. And I have the window open and that feels good.
I’m in Paris because my French publishers keep me busy, and they have just brought out a book of my unpublished collected writing—essays, stories, letters, and so on—called “The Position of Spoons.”
Why “The Position of Spoons”?
It’s the title of a story in the anthology, and there’s something about putting a collection of writing together. You’re positioning, you’re deciding what’s going to be against what.
Was there something in particular that drew you to spoons?
The French title is “La Position de la Cuillère,” which means “the spoon position.” And when the book is published in the U.K. next year, it will also be “Spoon Position”—a title with a different meaning, I think. Just slightly sexualized. The story is about a man who always wants his spoon, when he eats his boiled egg, to face the egg. It’s a little obsessional. He feels faint and disoriented if the spoon changes position.
Your work feels very French to me, even though you’re not from France. It’s maybe to do with sensuality and the absence of puritanical shame. Pleasure is healthy but not fetishized; you pay attention to the idea of living well. Does that seem fair?
There is certainly a lack of shame in the living autobiographies. They’re not written with the shame of a shipwrecked marriage; they try to write themselves out of societal shame. And my characters take pleasure in small things. It’s a suffering world and a nourishing one; it contains many things that are of sustenance.
I grew up on French literature, by mistake, at my school in London. We had an Irish librarian and translated literature was very hard to find, especially for my generation. My mother had introduced me to Colette—I’d never been to France and was thirteen, fourteen—and it was as if a wind had blown in from Burgundy and from Paris. When I read about Colette’s mother, in her book “Sido,” I wanted my mother to be just like Sido, to make me hot chocolate and to point out spiders, the silk of their webs, and to show me the dew on a rose in the morning. But my mother was scared of spiders.
Deborah Levy’s Search for a Major Female Character
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