It’s an expensive business, being alive. It takes a toll on hearts and pockets alike. And it’s especially costly if you’re compelled to live outside conventional structures. Freedom, as the novelist, playwright and essayist Deborah Levy observes, “is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs”.
In 2013, Levy published a slim, incendiary book, Things I Don’t Want to Know, a response to Orwell’s 1946 essay “Why I Write”. In it she grappled with her own biography, attempting to figure out in particular what it means to write from the “the suburb of femininity”, and how to reconcile the demands of motherhood with making art.
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