Things I Don't Want To Know

I had to learn to interrupt, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then louder, and then to just speak in my own voice which is not loud at all. - Deborah Levy

I had read the second and third volumes of Deborah Levy's 'Living Autobiography' series and finally got around to reading the first. Things I Don't Want to Know (2013) covers her childhood years in South Africa and her adolescence in London. The very short book uses George Orwell's book Why I Write as an outline with each of its four chapters named for Orwell's motivations (sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose).

The book opens in Mallorca, moves to South Africa and London then returns to Mallorca. She talks about being a woman and a mother and her experience of writing. We learn about her early life as a white child in a political family in apartheid South Africa, her father's four year imprisonment, their move to London and the end of her parents' marriage. 

It's a thought-provoking work that describes the struggle of the writing life and the  emergence of the author through everyday life experiences and interactions. Her reflections, as always, are wonderfully eloquent and draw us into the mind of the writer. Having read the later volumes of her memoir first added a different perspective and I may have enjoyed this slim slice of Levy's life all the more because of it.