Things I Don't Want to Know
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  • Published: 16 April 2018
  • ISBN: 9780241983089
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $22.99

Things I Don't Want to Know

Living Autobiography 1

Formats & editions
Paperback
16 Apr 2018
EBook
6 Feb 2014
Audiobook
5 Apr 2018
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First instalment of Levy's essential 'living autobiography' trilogy - reissued to match the beautiful COST OF LIVING hardback

Taking George Orwell's famous essay, 'Why I Write', as a jumping-off point, Deborah Levy offers her own indispensable reflections of the writing life. With wit, clarity and calm brilliance, she considers how the writer must stake claim to that contested territory and shape it to her need. It is a work of dazzling insight and deep psychological succour, from one of our most vital contemporary writers.

This first volume of the trilogy focuses on the writer as a young woman - the confusion and turbulence of youth, and the uncertainties of carving an identity as a writer. The second volume, The Cost of Living, speaks to the challenges of middle age as a writer and a woman - motherhood, separation, bereavement.

  • Published: 16 April 2018
  • ISBN: 9780241983089
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $22.99
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About the author

Deborah Levy

Deborah Levy was born in 1969, studied theatre at Dartington College of Arts, and now lives in London. Her plays include Pax, which City Limits considred 'remarkable for its combination of intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination' and Heresies for the Royal Shakespeare Company, 'An ambitious, imaginative, sometimes funny, sometimes touching, passage across a terrain where moral parables and folk fancies meet' (Marina Warner, Independent). She has also published a collection of short stories, Ophelia and the Great Idea, and a novel, Beautiful Mutants, and, most recently, Swallowing Geography, all of which are published by Vintage.

Also by Deborah Levy

Hot Milk
The Position of Spoons
August Blue
The Cost of Living
Real Estate
The Man Who Saw Everything
Beautiful Mutants
See all

Praise for Things I Don't Want to Know

An up-to-date version of 'A Room of One's Own' . . . I suspect it will be quoted for many years to come

Irish Examiner

Superb sharpness and originality of imagination. It is feminist and political while being an inspiring work of writing . . . She writes on the high wire, unfalteringly

Marina Warner

Levy's strength is her originality of thought and expression

Jeanette Winterson

An exciting writer, sharp and shocking as the knives her characters wield

Sunday Times

One of the few contemporary British writers comfortable on a world stage

New Statesman

A writer whose anger and confusion in the face of the world transform into poetic flights of fancy . . . which always feel marvellously right

Independent
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