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

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’. She flies to Majorca, where, stuck on a mountain the night she arrives, she takes comfort in ‘being literally lost when I was lost in every other way’. Reading her notebooks later, she alights on a Polish director’s advice to a young actress: ‘to speak up is not about speaking louder, it is about feeling entitled to voice a wish’. As Levy guides us along thoughtful diversions through ‘the suburb of femininity’ and motherhood, we infer that her ‘political purpose’ is for women to be able to speak up in this way.

Levy tells us about Melissa, the first person who encouraged her to speak up. Under Orwell’s heading of ‘historical impulse’, she takes us back to Johannesburg in 1964, when her father was taken away as a political prisoner, and five-year-old Levy was sent to stay with friends of her mother’s and their beautiful, defiant teenage daughter Melissa. Her father’s absence haunts Levy, as he ghosts himself into her childish relationship with a snowman and a caged budgie — poetic, naïve conflations which are painfully affective. Her father returns from prison four years later, thin and pale, looking ‘like he has been hurt in some way. Very deep inside him.’

We jump ahead to Levy striding through West Finchley as a teenager in lime green platform shoes and a ‘black straw hat with square holes punched in the brim’. She goes to a greasy spoon where she writes on paper napkins.