Emily Rhodes

Things I Don’t Want to Know, by Deborah Levy – review

issue 22 June 2013

In her powerful rejoinder to Orwell’s 1946 essay ‘Why I Write’, Deborah Levy responds to his proposed motives for writing — ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ — with illuminating moments of autobiography.

Levy begins one spring when she was crying on escalators, ‘at war with my lot’.

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