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Summary

A shimmering jewel of a book about writing from two-time Booker Prize finalist Deborah LevyBlending 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 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; 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 listener into a writer's heart.

Duration: about 3 hours (02:39:33)
Publishing date: 2021-11-30; Unabridged; Copyright Year: 2021. Copyright Statment: —

• Biography & Memoirs
• Essay