Motherload

I asked myself another question. Should I accept my lot? If I was to buy a ticket and travel all the way to acceptance, if I was to greet it and shake its hand, if I was to entwine my fingers with acceptance and walk hand in hand with acceptance every day, what would that feel like? After a while I realized I could not accept my question. A female writer cannot afford to feel her life too clearly. If she does, she will write in a rage when she should write calmly. She will write in a rage when she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot. (Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own  (1929)).  Deborah Levy, Things I Don't Want to Know (2013) I have gone on loving Deborah Levy's essays on why she writes, although 'loving' seems hardly the word for the world of pain she is illuminating in each essay.  Without ever saying so direct...

Sheer egoism , aesthetic enthusiasm , historical impulse and political purpose are George Orwell's four motivations for writing, as he articulates them in Why I Write . In  Things I Don't Want To Know,  Deborah Levy takes these four apocalyptic horsemen and reorders them, tossing them about like pizza dough, as she offers her own, uncompromisingly female, version of why she writes. In the first essay, 'Political Purpose', she reopens a notebook she has held on to, but not written in since 1988, when she went to Poland to write about an avant-garde actress. Irresistibly we are reminded of Doris Lessing's four notebooks, and wonder which one this is most like – black, red, yellow or blue (old depression, Communism, new depression, dreams)? The title of that first essay might draw us towards Orwell or Lessing's Communism, particularly as Levy's own father was a member of the ANC, and particularly as she explicitly calls this her 'Polish notebook...