The Cost of Living | Deborah Levy

_{As Orson Welles told us, if we want a happy ending, it depends on where we stop the story.}

Deborah Levy’s autobiography trilogy is proving to be an absorbing reading experience with The Cost of Living being the second installment. I’m working my way through them slowly, savouring the stories of her life as well as enjoying all the bookish serendipity moments that seems to occur whenever I read one of her books.

Last month, I stumbled across Anna Verney’s Flashback Friday piece about her experience of reading The Cost of Living. Her commentary on reading Levy’s novels (as opposed to her non-fiction) struck a chord in particular and I wanted to save it somewhere. Here seemed as good as place as any (my underlining).

_{As readers of South African-born British writer Deborah Levy’s literary fiction will know, it always has an unsettlingly allusive quality. While grounded in precisely wrought images, her work doesn’t directly address or answer the themes that ripple beneath the surface. Indeed, part of the pleasure of reading her novels is in their aftermath. In their elision, they get under the reader’s skin.}

Anna Verney | Newtown Review of Books | 20 Jan 2023

I know that pleasure too. Levy’s novels have had the same effect on me.

Years later, I’m still caught up in the aftermath of reading Hot Milk in particular. One of my younger colleagues at the time also experienced a strong and lasting response. Whenever we catch up our shared fervor for Hot Milk usually finds its way into our chat at some point. From this, I believe that Levy’s work is ripe for rereading and will continue to speak to me in unexpected ways and live inside me as time goes by.

The first part of Levy’s ‘living autobiography’, Things I Don’t Want to Know, had its genesis thanks to George Orwell’s essay Why I Write, so it was only natural that Levy was asked by several interviewers if The Cost of Living had a similar origin story. Although there wasn’t a specific essay or prompt, she mentioned Louise Bourgeois, Barbara Hepworth, Marguerite Duras and Simone de Beauvoir as inspirations. Their thoughts around female ambition, friendship, dismantling one home and creating a new one, resonated with events in her own life.

The Cost of Living begins with an observation of a young woman reading quietly on her own in a bar in the Caribbean and what happens when an older man approaches her to chat. She reluctantly listens to his stories, then launches into a scuba diving story of her own. Levy could see that he wasn’t ‘that interested’ before he said, “You talk a lot don’t you?”

_{It was not that easy to convey to him, a man much older than she was, that the world was her world too. He had taken a risk when he invited her to join him at his table. After all, she came with a whole life and libido of her own. It had not occurred to him that she might not consider herself to be the minor character and him the major character. In this sense, she had unsettled a boundary, collapsed a social hierarchy, broken with the usual rituals.}

The book hinges on these ideas – our freedom to ‘speak our life as we feel it‘ even though we rarely do, as well as the way we invite the people in our lives to ‘read between the lines‘ of our personal stories, looking for those who are the ‘right readers‘. The concept of minor and major characters also echoes throughout the rest of the book as Levy relates the story of how her marriage broke down and the ways in which she rebuilt a new life for herself.

_{My marriage was the boat and I knew that if I swam back to it, I would drown. It is also the ghost that will always haunt my life.}

She references Elena Ferrante and Emily Dickinson as she journeys from being ‘wife’ to learning how to be herself alone again. She credits Proust with helping her through this particularly painful, early phase, and back into writing.

_{Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure the heart.}

All she needed to do now was find a space to write. It also brings me to the only quibble I have with her memoirs – no bibliography or notes. I like to be able to save-for-later and/or acknowledge certain authors or quotes that strike me when I read them.

Although I found my time with this book stimulating, I didn’t respond to it as strongly as I did with Things I Don’t Want to Know. I wondered if it was because I had not been through such a devastating break up (of a long-term marriage) and also didn’t even want to contemplate such an idea!

_{I was thinking clearly, lucidly; the move up the hill and the new situation had freed something that had been trapped an stifled. I became physically strong at fifty, just as my bones were supposed to be losing their strength. I had energy because I had no choice but to have energy. I had to write to support my children and I had to do all the heavy lifting.}

Levy’s fifty-something musings on freedom, memories, moving forward and belonging are topics I spent much of my (mostly single) twenties and thirties angsting over. It came from a different place with different life experiences, yet there were still many moments of recognition. Perhaps we all have to have at least one period in our lives like this? A period when feelings and introspection, reflection and analysis drive us on to become the version of the person we want or hope to be? When we attempt to create ‘a persona that was braver than I actually felt.’

There is so much more I could unpack (including an Orwell essay – which I will read & review soon) but for now I will let Levy’s ideas and images ripen and evolve as they will – and I’ll get back to you in a few years time to let you know about any beneath the surface ripples!

Epigraph: Marguerite Duras | Practicalities (1990)

_{You’re always more unreal to yourself than other people are.}

Favourite Quotes:

_{Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs.}

_{A gardener is always a futurist with a vision of how a small, humble plant will spring up and blaze in time.}

_{Sometimes we want to unbelong as much as we want to belong.}

_{I was with Kieregaard all the way: ‘Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.’}

• Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal in Nonfiction 2019
• Orwell essay: Shooting an Elephant New Writing, 2, Autumn 1936 (On page 112 ‘Orwell in his 1936 essay, Shooting an Elephant, noted that the imperialist “wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it”.’)

ISBN: 9780241977569
Cover Image: Vivre sa vie (1962) a film by Jean-luc Godard
Imprint: Penguin General UK
Published: 19 February 2019 (originally published 10th July 2018)
Format: Paperback
Pages: 208
Dates Read: 18th January - 5th February 2024

This post was written on the traditional land of the Wangal clan, one of the 29 clans of the Eora Nation within the Sydney basin. This Reading Life acknowledges that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are our first storytellers, and the traditional custodians of the lands, seas, and skies on which we live and work.